HP Labs enters a digital fourth dimension

 

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Posted on 24 Oct 2006 at 16:52

'Making history come alive' is not likely to send shivers of anticipation down the spines of many these days, but what HP Labs is up to in the Tower of London right now might make gazing glassily at dusty old relics and ruins a thing of past.

HP Labs is trialling its Mediascape technologies at the Tower during the half-term week, and visitors using a GPS- and RF-enabled iPaq handheld can get an insight into the characters and stories that make up the site's history.

So what? A bunch of tourists wandering around wearing headphones and listening to a virtual tour guide. It doesn't seem exactly new, does it? But HP Labs' approach is to use technology not to help describe the places and artefacts contained within a site, but rather to enact them.

For the Tower of London, this means that as you wander around the grounds, the device is tracked, and as soon as you come close to a point of interest, content is loaded from an SD card and you are given the story of one of the Tower's more famous inhabitants.

You have Guy Fawkes denying everything, or the little princes lamenting their fates locked away in the Tower depending on where you are. But there are also many other interesting tales involving less well known characters and nooks and crannies of the site.

Aileen Peirce, the Tower of London's Exhibition Project Manager said: 'What this is good at is bringing places alive that otherwise are not that interesting to look at.' For example, the inside of the Salt Tower reflects very accurately its exterior: bare stone walls. But entering the chamber with the Mediascape triggers the tale of the Jesuit priest John Gerard, who was tortured in the Tower in 1597 and later escaped to the Low Countries.

'What we're about is telling stories, and what we can do with this is put [the viewer] in the story,' said Peirce.

It's this ability to trigger events that sets the HP Labs' Mediascape platform apart. The implementation for the Tower of London also includes missions to help incarcerated characters escape, which sends the participant to various locations, encountering other characters on the way. Yeoman Warders wear RF dongles too, and if you pass too near them, you'll be 'virtually' arrested and sent down for five years.

Other Mediascape trials have taken place in Bristol, HP Labs' home, as well as San Francisco. But there are other similar initiatives afoot too. MIT's History Unwired uses Bluetooth to trigger a tour around the lesser known suburbs of Venice.

HP Labs' part in all this goes beyond the iPaq 2490, CompactFlash GPS unit, RF receiver and SD card necessary to use the service currently. It has developed the Mediascape platform to make it easy and accessible for organisations - or anyone - to put their knowledge and resources into creating a Mediascape for their sites. It runs on any Windows CE-based device.

There is already a free simplified version available for non-commercial use that has been adopted by the education sector with initiatives such as createascape.

And although some of the high-level stuff is proprietary and patentable, Paul Marsh, HP Labs Technical Support, told us that it is mainly XML-based (with the main coding done in C#).

Josephine Reid, of HP Labs' Technology and Lifestyle Integration Department told us that the department's aim is to keep any proprietary stuff out of the way of anyone wanting to use the platform. 'We're looking at this from very much a viral approach. So our goal is to keep the platform open and modular.