Gamifying Navigation in Location-Based Applications

Location-based games entertain players usually by interactions at points of interest (POIs). Navigation between POIs often involve the use of either a physical or digital map, not taking advantage of the opportunity available to engage users in activities between POIs. The paper presents riddle solving as a navigational method for a location-based game. 10 families with 2-6 persons and at least one child in the age range 9- 11 years old participated in the evaluation. Results show that riddle solving as a navigational method is more enjoyable than a 2D digital map. Additional findings from video recordings, field notes, questionnaires, logging and semi-structured interviews revealed that riddle solving has potential for engaging users in learning activities

THE PASSING INTENSITIES OF A NEIGHBORHOOD. SENSING ATMOSPHERES IN LA BOCA

The neighborhood of La Boca, located in the city of Buenos Aires, is an urban space burdened with a story and a unique aesthetic that differentiates it from other barrios in the city. In 2022, I visited this area to walk its streets, with the goal of understanding what elements marked this urban area as a distinctive place in the city. Situated within the rhetoric of space and place, this study relies on the concept of atmospheres developed by Gernot Böhme to account for the way the experience of place is constituted by an interplay between bodies, materiality and spaces. My research attends to the sensual qualities of place, I inquire about the way certain places feel, and how we become sensually and mentally inclined by space. The study helps illustrate how the atmosphere of a place emerges out of a rhetorical process, and the potential the concept offers for rhetorical examinations of space and place

Perseverance of North American Train Hopping Travels: A Look at the Past & the Present

Drawing on ethnographic materials gathered at three different locations namely Britt, Montreal and online, this thesis looks at aspects of the persistence of contemporary train hopping travels from the perspective of young adult travelers who hopped and traveled via freight trains, once and again, between North American locales. To better understand the current contexts and motivations that continue to entice these travelers to engage in train hopping journeys, I sought to review the historical backgrounds or processes that encouraged earlier forms of train hopping travels in North America especially between the few decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In considering the orientations of the interlocutors participating in this research in light of the historical accounts associated with earlier train hopping travels, this thesis suggests that a certain category of travelers is likely to continue their involvement in train hopping journeys because they consider themselves particularly advantaged in knowing how to navigate the prohibited space of railroad freight lines. More specifically, these travelers derive a peculiar sense of pride in fashioning a style of train hopping by continuing to improvise new train hopping paths of their own. Such improvised paths are not only uncertain, irregular, unpaved or un-pedestrian-like, hence difficult to navigate, but also diverge from other previous yet ephemeral routes. The willingness of some insiders to the train hopping traveling culture to resume finding or tracing their own fleeting paths to a departing freight railcar machine may account in part for the persistence of train hopping journeys today. At times, a few will never hesitate to encourage or even take other potential travelers on such journeys. Keywords Train hopping, Freight hopping, Tramping, Hoboing, and Catching ou

Homeward Bound: How Translators Negotiate the Foreign in Travel and Tourism. An English-Russian Case Study.

My research addresses intercultural communication in the field of travel and the industry of tourism and the challenges faced by translators between cultures. In my thesis I explore selected texts about foreign travel in English and in Russian and their Russian and English translations (respectively) in order to show the importance of differentiating between the ways in which translators, travellers and tourists represent and contrast foreign and domestic elements. In Chapters One and Two, I explore target-oriented and source-oriented translations. My analysis suggests that target-oriented translation can be creatively combined with source-oriented translation, both on a semantic level, by translators of travel texts and on a narrative level, by those travellers who write accounts of their experiences. Thus translators of travel literature create a holistic image of a foreign culture using analogies familiar to readers of the target language. My comparisons of English-language The Lonely Planet and Rough Guides travel guides to China, Finland and Russia with their Russian translations suggest that texts targeted at different audiences can be significantly divergent in terms of content. Translators take different approaches not only in their use of target-oriented and source-oriented translations, but also in the degree of creativity and adaptation/localization which they employ. My analysis of articles from British Cereal magazine and their Russian translations, which I study in Chapter Three of my thesis, shows that creativity may be a legitimate aspect of translation strategy, or an attempt by publishers to alter the original text radically in order to make it more appealing to the target audience. In Chapter Four, I focus my analysis of online texts for tourists on Condé Nast Traveller magazine and the Booking.Com website (both English and Russian versions) in order to establish why localization experts replace translators. My thesis concludes that the role of the translator in the travel industry encompasses a spectrum of linguistic and extra-linguistic tasks based on connections between foreign and domestic values, including strategies of localization and adaptation

Introduction to location-based mobile learning

[About the book] The report follows on from a 2-day workshop funded by the STELLAR Network of Excellence as part of their 2009 Alpine Rendez-Vous workshop series and is edited by Elizabeth Brown with a foreword from Mike Sharples. Contributors have provided examples of innovative and exciting research projects and practical applications for mobile learning in a location-sensitive setting, including the sharing of good practice and the key findings that have resulted from this work. There is also a debate about whether location-based and contextual learning results in shallower learning strategies and a section detailing the future challenges for location-based learning

Augmenting the field experience: a student-led comparison of techniques and technologies

In this study we report on our experiences of creating and running a student fieldtrip exercise which allowed students to compare a range of approaches to the design of technologies for augmenting landscape scenes. The main study site is around Keswick in the English Lake District, Cumbria, UK, an attractive upland environment popular with tourists and walkers. The aim of the exercise for the students was to assess the effectiveness of various forms of geographic information in augmenting real landscape scenes, as mediated through a range of techniques and technologies. These techniques were: computer-generated acetate overlays showing annotated wireframe views from certain key points; a custom-designed application running on a PDA; a mediascape running on the mScape software on a GPS-enabled mobile phone; Google Earth on a tablet PC; and a head-mounted in-field Virtual Reality system. Each group of students had all five techniques available to them, and were tasked with comparing them in the context of creating a visitor guide to the area centred on the field centre. Here we summarise their findings and reflect upon some of the broader research questions emerging from the project

Representations of the city in video games

This research strives to characterize the means by which video game players experience and understand the space of the game city during the course of play. Three-dimensional video game cities are neither static environments nor stationary views; rather, they are experienced through movement, action, and play. Our experiences of new places are not developed at a glance. Instead, they are cultivated through use over time. This work utilizes games that take place in constructed versions of New York City as a case study. By focusing on the ways players navigate spaces, we can understand how they construct spatial awareness and how this space is transformed into a meaningful place of play. In order to come to this understanding, this study asks a series of questions: How are these spaces arranged? How does the player move through the space and how does the game teach spatial navigation? What actions are performed in the space and how is gameplay adapted for the city environment? And how do of narrative environments contribute to a player's identification with the space? These questions are examined within a framework of urban, cultural, and game studies. I examine techniques that are employed by video game city designers to help players navigate space and make it meaningful. Additionally, this research poses areas for future expansion and experimentation with game cities.M.S.Committee Chair: Pearce, Celia; Committee Member: Do, Ellen Yi-Luen; Committee Member: Knoespel, Kenneth; Committee Member: Nitsche, Michae