Location-based Media Research Articles

Engaging locals in rural areas: value correspondence in placemaking through mobile augmented reality

ABSTRACT This research proposes value correspondence, which posits that the value shared in correspondence between stakeholders is essential for the development of placemaking in rural areas. By investigating location-based media; particularly mobile augmented reality (MAR) apps aimed at both reviving local tourism in rural townships and soliciting opinions from major stakeholders, the author has determined that local residents play a vital role in the placemaking process. However, research in this field has often ignored local residents and instead focused on tourists’ perceptions and augmented reality technology. Various MAR apps have been designed as forms of self-service technology that benefits tourists but, to some extent, also hinders dialog between tourists and locals; this results in value noncorrespondence, which may lead to the failure of placemaking. Thus, the author advocates that more attention should be paid to how locals can generate value in correspondence with other stakeholders via the use of MAR.

Story and storage – narrative theory as a tool for creativity in augmented reality storytelling

Digital domains render possible new forms of narrative creativity. This article explores to what extent it is practicable to inform the invention of new storytelling techniques in location-based media, such as augmented reality (AR). When carrying out research and development with explorative storytelling in indirect AR one often encounters a recurring problem. When digitally reconstructing and displaying sequences of historical events in situ, a paradox tends to emerge. While the linear sequence of actions and events might often benefit from in-depth information on historical contexts of various sorts, the moment the user embarks on a contextual digression to seek a better understanding, the sequence itself is abandoned and/or fragmented. This is a type of conflict where the designer must make difficult choices to provide a prolific story experience. How may we best combine and balance sequence and access, storytelling and in-depth exploration to the benefit of rich locative perceptions and adventures? In the following article we consult narrative theory to find a design and implement the solution in three different simulations of on-site historical events. These are selected from antiquity and the Second World War. We discuss the challenges and elucidations so far, as well as feedback from visitors testing the situated simulation AR applications on location.

Departing glances: A sociotechnical account of ‘leaving’ Grindr

Grindr is a popular location-based social networking application for smartphones, predominantly used by gay men. This study investigates why users leave Grindr. Drawing on interviews with 16 men who stopped using Grindr, this article reports on the varied definitions of leaving, focusing on what people report leaving, how they leave and what they say leaving means to them. We argue that leaving is not a singular moment, but a process involving layered social and technical acts – that understandings of and departures from location-based media are bound up with an individual’s location. Accounts of leaving Grindr destabilize normative definitions of both ‘Grindr’ and ‘leaving’, exposing a set of relational possibilities and spatial arrangements within and around which people move. We conclude with implications for the study of non-use and technological departure.

Locating the Social and Mobile: A Case Study of Women’s Use of Kakao Social Mobile Media in Seoul

AbstractThe rise of locative, social, and mobile media in the form of smartphones has been as uneven as it has been dynamic. Given recent debates in global media about surveillance and location-based media, this paper provides some nuanced examples of how everyday smartphone users are reflecting upon location-based services within the smartphone convergence. In particular, this paper considers how the unique ways location-based services are, and are not, being taken up within a context once lauded for its new media uptake, South Korea. I consider some of the resistances to services such as geo-tagging that are partly informed by issues around corporate (Samsung) surveillance and also partly about a more prosaic view to sharing details via social mobile media.

Geomedia: on location-based media, the changing status of collective image production and the emergence of social navigation systems

The increased computational power of portable devices such as smart phones and laptops, and their integration with widely available global positioning systems, are opening the way for a new range of location-based applications that integrate and coordinate users' mediated interactions and data exchanges with other users' live geographical positions. This user-generated information, shared on navigable live virtual maps such as Google Latitude, Foursquare and Gowalla, illustrates the increasing use of location-based applications and the Web to create, assemble and disseminate personal information (in the form of images, sounds and text) to enable shared experiences of individually and socially relevant spaces and events. The new virtual maps, in which this information is visually blurred and merged, represent the emergence of a new paradigm in the visualisation of space. The article elaborates on the fundamental social and perceptual shifts that are being operated today by these new technologies and software applications that the author refers to as geomedia. Geomedia are not new media per se, but platforms that merge existing electronic media + the Internet + location-based technologies (or locative media) + AR (Augmented Reality) technologies in a new mode of digital composite imaging, data association and socially maintained data exchange and communication. In the article the author examines the early adoption of such new geolocation-based technologies and develops a theoretical analysis of the ontological and epistemological shifts that characterise their contemporary evolution, patterns of production and exchange, and the unique form of geolocational digital re-aggregation of which digital images are now a part.