Hidden Dimensions: Illuminating Landscape History through Mobile Apps

摘要

Visitors and tourists in unfamiliar places often rely on guidebooks and popular tourism-themed websites to interpret the landscape around them. These resources often direct visitors to the same few landmarks recognized as preeminent destinations. While docents can provide additional information, their presence is logistically limited to interpretation of only points of interest with a consistently high level of visitor interest. Lost in these experiences are the abundance of sites that initially lack a high profile, as well as the many underlying layers that create context and meaning within the landscape. This presentation describes the development and user experience of a mobile application designed to uncover the hidden layers of a landscape while illuminating its biophysical, historic, and cultural dimensions. The application responds to the user's movements, making them aware of the landscape around them, regardless of the paths they choose to explore. Geo-tagged landmarks are used as triggers to provide rich visual and audio commentary to a visitor, with an emphasis on facilitating discovery and understanding of elements that would have otherwise remained hidden. Through a focus group of users, response data directs how this responsive mobile application can be employed on a larger scale, uncovering meaning in the landscape and revealing previously hidden biophysical, historic, and cultural dimensions.