PDA City Tour, iWalk (Podcast), Mobile applications
As a tourist you have a variety of possibilities exploring Vienna; you can use the old fashioned way of a map or city guide, or you switch to techniques like the iWalk, PDA City Tour or other mobile applications like Photosynth.
All of these new technologies have advantages and disadvantages according to “real” devices like books and we had to find those out in our university course called Tourism and Hospitality Business Applications.
Our professors allocated our class in groups, supported us with devices (the PDA City Tour computer and GPS tracker thing) and told us to make photos that we could use them later for Photosynth.
The bigger picture of our task in the inner city of Vienna was to collect as much primary data as possible with our cameras and GPS devices that we will be able create our own city guide after a few sessions.
Apart from the task to creating photos, we had to try out new technologies like the PDA City Tour or the iWalk.
I think that there is not really a big difference between a travel guide in book form or in a electronic one; either you have to read or to listen.
In other words there is not so much interaction between the devices and the user.
You had to check the numbers on the physical map against with where you are the moment.
Are you near the monument you want to be ?!
Though if you found the right monument ( and I mostly knew them since I am from Vienna) the information provided from the PDA and the iWalk was useful and interestingly packaged.
However in the End it was a great day and we all had a lot of fun,
Cheers
Pius
