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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

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is to keep the platform open and modular.

'The commercial opportunities with this have still to be worked out. We are working with HP Business on product and commercialisation, but no decisions have been made.'

She said that any commercial element would most likely involve HP's expertise in hosting and serving content, as well as systems for dealing with things such as subscriptions, rather than charging for use of the platform per se.

Even so, the kind of kit needed to run this kind of tour on a wide scale is likely to motivate many a begging letter to the Lottery Fund without considering any extra charges. And it's a financial aspect not lost on Peirce at HM Tower of London.

'Yes, it is expensive,' she told us. 'But we think people will increasingly bring their own devices with them.'

'And once we have something like pervasive WiFi, the content can be held online on HP's servers and streamed directly,' added Reid.

GPS phones are already being launched, and once commonplace, visitors will be able to download a Mediascape when they visit a historical site without needing any other hardware at all.

But a platform such as Mediascape has other ramifications for the likes of the Tower, which is already looking at technology with a fresh appetite.

'We've got a technology group internally now,' said Peirce. 'But traditionally, we've been stuck using pretty old devices. That's because everybody has these long term commitments where you are locked into certain hardware and long contracts. So a system like Mediascape is great where we can use our in-house expertise and know-how to build these things. It puts control back into the site's owners.'

It's still early days for the project. The GPS device took a while to locate its satellites and establish where it was to begin with. The RF points were set with a wide range, in order to ensure there was no chance we would miss any points, although it meant the long arm of the law had an even greater reach and we were arrested when we strayed within shouting distance of a Yeoman Warder.

Even so, it remains an ambitious project, and put together in barely three months, including the creation of all the content and missions using 'our massive talent pool of internal actors,' according to Peirce.

'In terms of complexity, this is at the top', said Reid. 'But we're taking what we're learning from trials like this and feeding it back into the platform.'

And despite the teething problems, we certainly came away having learned a lot about the Tower of London and without having succumbed to the kind of fact- and date-blindness usually associated with such excursions.

But this is just the beginning. The platform itself will become more sophisticated as time goes on, as will Mediascape implementations allowing for example, not just interaction with the historical site, but also with the other visitors.

There are also any number of other applications. The platform can handle any kind of sensor, for example. 'We can skin different versions of the platform for different vertical applications,' said Reid.

It has already been used with heart rate monitors in a project where participants have to accomplish goals without raising their heart-rate above a given level. You could embed a receiver in the end of a golf club and have a real-time analysis of your swing, or sensors in your knees that would tell you the correct posture for optimum speed as you descend a ski-run.

'We think of this as a new medium,' said Reid, 'Like a digital fourth dimension laid over a physical space. Understanding it's value will enable us to go beyond the delivery of "anything, anytime, anywhere", to the delivery of the "right thing at the right time to the right place".'

For more information, visit HP Labs and Historic Royal Palaces.