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Mobile exploration of geotagged photographs

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Abstract

Columbus is a mobile application that lets users explore their surroundings through geotagged photographs, presented to them at the location they were taken. By moving around the physical world, the user unlocks photographs and gets to see and experience them in unison with their location. During two consecutive field trials, we investigated how the application was used and experienced and how photographs and locations are explored together. We found that previous experience with the surroundings people was exploring affected how they experienced the localized content. We report on the system’s design and implementation, the trials as well as resulting insights that can be used by other developers of locative media applications.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all participants in the study. We also thank our colleagues and reviewers of this paper for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mobile Life Centre/SICS, Isafjordsgatan 22, 164 40, Kista, Sweden

    Mattias Rost, Henriette Cramer & Lars Erik Holmquist

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  1. Mattias Rost
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  2. Henriette Cramer
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  3. Lars Erik Holmquist
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mattias Rost.

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Rost, M., Cramer, H. & Holmquist, L.E. Mobile exploration of geotagged photographs. Pers Ubiquit Comput 16, 665–676 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0433-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0433-x

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