Technical Information

In order to complete this mobile guide, we had to overcome many obstacles. How to the guide would function was clear from day 1, but how to get there?

We started out with some photos at each stop of the tour. These were then used as backgrounds in the flash animations, but we will come back to that later. We then put together a script with the different narrators and recorded them ourselves with a microphone and a laptop. These voice tracks were then modified in order for the voices to fit better into the context, and not to sound too much like ourselves.

Ok, now we had photos and sound. In order to make the animations for the tour, we had somehow to combine all of these parts into one. We also manipulated photos of real people from the 18th century and turned them into ghosts - our real guides. All of this modifying and manipulating were done in Adobe Photoshop CS2. Further we imported the backgrounds and ghosts into Macromedia Flash 8, where the animations were created. Since the mobile phones could not handle advanced action scripting, such as looping we had to make the animations quite long and extremely linear. Every animation were created according to the timeline set by the voice recordings, and when the animations were done we imported the voice tracks. The movies were then converted to .3gp, which is the supported video format in the mobile phones.

Then, in order to integrate these videos into the walk we put them online and could then access them using semacodes. Semacodes are monochrom shapes that are constructed based on a given URL. There are several software applications for mobile phones, such as Upcode and Semacode, that "read" these files and then accesses the URL through the phone. This way all the "user" have to do is to scan the semacode with the mobile software (e.g. Upcode) open, through the mobile camera and then the phone itself downloads whatever information the URL provides. In this particular case, the URL leads the user directly to the movie files, which are then opened in Real Player on the mobile.

It is also possible to improve the download time by saving the files on the phone and access them locally through semacodes. This is done in the same way as above, with the only exception that the files are on the phone instead of on a internet server. This, however, is not very beneficial when it comes to larger files, since the phone memory is restricted.

Enjoy!