A Day in the Park
The amusement park offers a microcosm for Horizon research. Tens of thousands of visitors each day stream into a park, navigate its various attractions, experience many forms of high-tech entertainment and take home recordings and souvenirs of their experiences.
The Day in the Park research allowed us to engage key industry partners in order to explore how the concept of a contextual footprint, that included biosensing data gathered from riders, can underpin future digital economy services.
The research particularly focused on two areas:
- Supporting new forms of souvenirs and storytelling
- The development of personalised and adaptive entertainment experiences
This involved mining data captured from a previous EPSRC Digital Economy feasibility study, conducting sensitising field studies at the park, staging two workshops to explore new ride experiences and forms of souvenir, and finally conducting two public trials of an adaptive experience and a prototype souvenir system at Alton Towers in the summer of 2010.
Automics
As part of our research into new forms of souvenirs and storytelling, we worked with partners; Alton Towers and Picsolve to investigate souvenir creation and the use of digital media when visiting a theme park.
Current digital technology within a theme park allows visitors to capture their experience in the form of on-ride photographs and videos as a memento of their day. Horizon’s challenge was to research the visitor experience and develop a new souvenir service from the research findings.
The result was Automics, a photo-souvenir service which utilises mobile devices to support the capture, sharing and annotation of digital images amongst groups of visitors. It combines both individual and group photographs with the existing in-park, on-ride photo services to allow users to create printed photo-stories with speech and thought bubbles incorporated to enable personalisation.
The research explored the interaction between visitors, smart phones and the theme parks’ systems to create a new personalised souvenir service which could effectively be offered as a tool to the commercial world.