Locast: travels

Location-based media & travel experience

Mobile experience, Locative, Wearable computing
Venice (IT) / MIT, February - July 2009

Locast Travels consists in a articulated platform that combines a distributed web application, a location-based mobile application and a wearable device to support the entire travel experience. With its rich toolbox, Locast Travels improves each of the 4 phases in the travel experience: Trip organization, Travel to destination, Visit, Post-visit.

Brief / Concept

Locast is a flexible location-based platform that combines distributed Web and Mobile applications that create hyperlocal and highly-connected experiences. Locast superimposes layers of collectively generated information within the physical space. The augmentation of urban space is democratically operated by Locast users as they participate in the content-generation process. Each interaction within the system can be followed by people engaging in the physical space, and those participating online. The interconnection between content, spaces and people is simultaneous and ubiquitous.

Locast Travels tools improve each of the 4 phases of the touristic experience: trip organization (travel information available through website, podcasts, ebooks), travel to destination (podcasts, videos for handsets, connection to feeds related to services, transportation conditions, weather forecast, etc), visit (mobile application: location-based content consumption & production, navigation, itineraries, social media, connection to local services. Wearable device: context awareness), post-visit (website: personal page collecting travel experience memory. Wearable navigation device: becomes augmented souvenir / networked object).

Design Process

The advanced prototypes were deployed in Venice in July 2009 and covered the 4-phases of the travel experience with tools to organize the visit (creation itineraries, browsing contents, waypoints, involving social network), obtain information while traveling (podcasts, weather forecast, updates on transportation conditions), improve the visit (Locast Travels' core value: a combination of mobile, wearable and web application to augment the tourist experience and the context-awareness) and maintain a link when the visit is over (wearable elements becomes an emotional device, personal casts can be visited or shared on the web application).

Locast Travels was developed during a 5-months period following a process starting with the background research and that followed up with the concept generation phase, refinement, user experience and interaction design - and the final implementation of mobile and web application and the wearable device. During the deployment, a one-week of user tests / ethnography was arranged to investigate the tourist-oriented platform usage in a real context.