Travelling Stories: Mobile Applications for Storytellers

This paper discusses the outcomes of a research carried out in collaboration with the BT Mobility Research Centre and the National Institute of Design in India, aimed of understanding appropriate applications for the use of mobile phones as leisure multimedia devices for nomadic users such as commuters and travellers. This work intended to go beyond the use of mobile devices to broadcast of TV or download of music, video clips, paying special attention to the contextual usage of this media and trying to solve some unsolved issues for these interfaces as the low sociability, creativity, contextual sensitivity and interaction that so far they enable. It prospects a use of mobile interactive multimedia systems in future communication scenarios in which users can create and share self-authored & contextual digital content. Websites such as YouTube, AOL and Yahoo providing access to personal videos that have been taken using webcams, video cameras or mobile phones, evidence an emerging trend where users become authors of multimedia content. This selfauthored content production is finding application in different areas: information (travel, finance, mortgages, cooking, culture, health, etc), entertainment (sports, gossips, performance, etc), government, commerce, etc. For example, BeenThere and TheWorldisnotFlat are user generated travel sites where people can share tips about places to go on holiday. Moreover, some major newspapers like The Guardian, use this content in their Travel section. Furthermore, other more structured websites link the videos to specific places – using, for example, Google maps enabling users to locate the videos in a map, relating the self-authored content to a specific context. Another interesting example of self-authored content is http://www.wefeelfine.org, which is an ‘exploration of human emotion on a global scale’, or in other words, a navigation among different people’s feelings (self-authored texts, sounds, pictures or videos) and emotions in the past few hours. These feelings are organized by the users into six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.User centered design methodologies that take effectively into account peripatetic users interacting in their real contexts are crucial in order to identify realistic scenarios and applications for pervasive interactive multimedia systems that provide positive user experiences. This article supports the statement that handhelds due to intrinsic attributes such as friendly multimedia production tools (video, pictures and text mainly), ubiquitous presence, communication capabilities and nimbleness to dialog with surrounding platforms such as iTV, PCs, PDAs, in-car-navigators and smart-house deployments, are highly plausible tools to support users’ creation and distribution of self-authored multimedia content in pervasive communication scenarios. This paper explores the futures 870 A. Cereijo Roibás, N. Sabnani, and R. Sala of pervasive interactive multimedia systems, and in particular the user experience related to the generation and publishing, broadcasting and narrowcasting of self-authored multimedia content through mobile devices. For this scope, it analyzes some traditional storytelling methods and tools, specially the kavaad that is still in use in Rajasthan, India in order to understand mechanisms can be the most suitable for storytelling self-production and sharing.