Monday, June 9, 2008
Hiroyuki Tarumi & Keitaro Yamada
Kagawa
University, Japan
Applications and Evaluation of GPS Phone-Based
Virtual World to Sightseeing and Education.
Abstract
In Japan, GPS phones are now very popular.
The first product was released
in 2001 and, today, about half of mobile phones have GPS. We have long been
studying mobile applications with public GPS phones. GPS applications with
PDA or larger devices are well studied worldwide. However, the merits of
our approaches are that the total system cost is inexpensive, and that
there are plenty of subjects for evaluation who are familiar with the device.
Our system provides a virtual world geographically overlaid onto the
real world; i.e., users can visit a virtual world depending on their location
in the real world. We have developed several applications. We will
talk about two of them. One is a sightseeing support application. 29 real
tourists evaluated our system with their own GPS phones. Another application
is for history education. It was applied to a real classroom; 34 junior-high
school students used it to visit a virtual past world to learn a landslide
disaster in 1938. We will also talk about results of these evaluation sessions.
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