“LiveGuide: An Online Guided Tour” Goes Live at Custard In The Ether

“LiveGuide: An Online Guided Tour” Goes Live

By admin | September 4, 2008

After many months of development, I am pleased to announce that my latest project - “LiveGuide” - is finally online.

LiveGuide is a new design of online tour, intended to more closely mimic the features of a real world guided tour of a location thank traditional virtual tours. In particular, LiveGuide focusses on the narrative and interactive elements of a live tour to deliver a more complete experience for the online tourist.

In the course of researching this project, it became apparent that there is a tendency when communicating factual information online to using hypertext to provide a lot of the contextualization for the information. However, in the real world, this contextualization is often supplied by narrative - as in a guided tour. LiveGuide is an experiment in combining the functionality and flexibility of hypertext and the stricter structure of a narrative. The tour has a defined tour route, around which the narrative is structured, but there are also opportunities to pause at particular locations and select from a range of options so one can explore the space on a thematic basis. This balances the expectations of online users - who are used to the freedom of hypertext - with the need for narrative to make sense of the space in context.

The tour design also includes a live chatbot, named Tour Guide, who is programmed to answer any questions the tourist may have during the course of the tour. The training for this is ongoing, so I am able to review its responses and improve the quality of its comments the more people interact with it. The bot is also able to engage in conversation, as would a real tour guide, to enhance the user’s personal experience of the tour.

The tour design - featuring a 35 minute tour of the World Heritage City of Bath - is currently on show here. You will require headphones or speakers to listen to the tour and the latest version of Flash Player. This is a test version of the design, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA in Creative Writing & New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester. I would be interested to hear about people’s experiences/reactions when taking the tour and invite comments either on this blog post or by email to: custard@custardether.co.uk.