Each year during the month of August, the city of Edinburgh hosts a number of international festivals, including an
international arts festival, a book festival, a film festival and also the world's largest arts festival, the Edinburgh Fringe
Festival, with more than 250 venues and 1700 shows, many of which take place daily throughout a four-week period. These
festivals bring a large number of tourists to Edinburgh who spend several days discovering the city, and its numerous
bars and restaurants as well as visiting events.
During the festivals, the city is full of various forms of printed information including special venue maps,
official brochures, daily programmes and event flyers. In addition, lots of information is available on official
festival websites as well as websites of various newspapers.
Fig. 1: EdFest interaction components
There are many strong arguments for retaining paper in mobile environments, including the fact that it is light, cheap,
robust and easily annotated in various ways. Also, the planning of activities during a city visit often involves
combining and comparing information within and across documents such as maps, event brochures and guidebooks and this
is easier using paper documents than working with digital mobile devices with small screens. The Edinburgh festivals
provide an ideal environment for testing technologies for mobile information systems and appropriate means of delivering
relevant information in a timely and convenient manner. We therefore chose to investigate the use of emerging technologies
for interactive paper in mobile tourist environments and particularly in the context of the Edinburgh festivals where
tourists may want to enter and share reviews, as well as plan their activities, while on the move.
Fig. 2: Interactive brochure
Based on the experiences already gained from developing the Zurich City Guide application, the Global Information Systems (GlobIS) research group at ETH Zurich built a mobile information
system for the Edinburgh festivals based mainly on a paper user interface. The resulting EdFest system contains different interaction
components, namely a special interactive paper brochure containing a map and event list, a digital pen and an earpiece with a
built-in microphone used for voice interaction. We considered various options for the display of information and decided to
dispense with any form of visual display such as a Pocket Computer, Tablet PC or head-mounted display and instead focus on
audio output for the first demonstrator.
Fig. 3: Interactive map
For the EdFest application we used the modified Nokia Digital Pen which works in streaming mode. A central server has a database
with information about venues, events, pubs, restaurants and also user reviews. The brochure contains a map which is marked
with venues and the user can request information about a venue by simply pointing with the pen at the appropriate
location on the map. The system will then initiate a voice dialogue that allows a user to get general information
about the venue or events being held there.
Fig. 4: Interactive bookmark
In addition to the interaction components, the users also carried a wearable computer with a Global Positioning System (GPS)
module for location tracking, enabling the system to detect a user's location and support locator and navigation
tasks. For example, there is a 'Where Am I?' button located at the bottom of the map. The system helps the user
locate their position on the map by telling them the general grid position, together with a general guide to the
placement within the grid e.g. "Grid F5, top right". If the user then points with the pen within that grid, the system
will give feedback telling them where to move the pen to arrive at the precise location, thereby helping users find
exact location on a map which can often be a frustrating and time-consuming task. Users can also use this functionality
to locate events listed in the brochure by pointing to the venue and being told where to find that venue on the map.
This is a form of paper-to-paper link where different parts of the physical booklet are linked together through digital media.
Fig. 5 shows parts of a booklet page listing different events. The user can access additional
information about an event by simply pointing to relevant areas within the event listing. As described earlier, pointing
to a venue, for example the Traverse Theatre, will result in audio instructions about where to find the venue on the map.
The user can also get information about the artist, a description of the event, other events of the same category and
ticket availability. In many cases, the choice of the exact type of information required is determined through a voice
dialogue. There is also a rating area where users can input their rating by selecting a star rating between 1 and 5.
The average rating is accessed by pointing to the text 'Rating'. It is also possible to set a reminder for a
specific event by pointing to the event’s timing information with the pen.
Fig. 5: EdFest brochure entry
Last but not least, the users can enter their reviews either by writing comments alongside the event listing or by writing
them in a separate notebook with the Anoto pattern. Notes that are written in a separate booklet can be linked to a
specific event by selecting the event’s title after the note has been captured. These reviews will be sent to the
central database server and can then be accessed by other users requesting information about the corresponding event.
Tests and user trials of the EdFest system took place in Edinburgh during August 2004 and August 2005. Usability
trials were carried out at various locations in the city, including public places and locations in and
around festival venues. They involved the testing of the EdFest prototype, a mix of semi-structured
interviews, observations based on video and audio recordings and also user questionnaires. Overall, the
response to the interactive brochure was positive although there were a number of both design and
technical issues raised.
Context-aware Platform for Mobile Data Management,
Moira C. Norrie, Beat Signer, Michael Grossniklaus, Rudi Belotti, Corsin Decurtins and Nadir Weibel,
Wireless Networks (WINET),
13(6), Springer, December 2007
Available:
2006
Paper-based Mobile Access to Databases,
Beat Signer, Moira C. Norrie, Michael Grossniklaus, Rudi Belotti, Corsin Decurtins and Nadir Weibel,
Demo Proceedings of SIGMOD 2006, ACM International Conference on Management of Data,
Chicago, USA, June 2006
Content Publishing Framework for Interactive Paper Documents,
Moira C. Norrie, Alexios Palinginis and Beat Signer,
Proceedings of DocEng 2005, ACM Symposium on Document Engineering,
Bristol, United Kingdom, November 2005 (acceptance rate: 33%)
Available:
Experimental Platform for Mobile Information Systems,
Rudi Belotti, Corsin Decurtins, Moira C. Norrie, Beat Signer and Ljiljana Vukelja,
Proceedings of MobiCom 2005, 11th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking,
Cologne, Germany, August 2005 (acceptance rate: 10%)
