The original Automics project (part of Horizon’s ‘Day in the Park’ project) prototyped a digital economy service to enable groups of visitors to a theme park to author their own photo story souvenirs. By using their mobile phones, visitors could share and caption their own photos alongside those taken by the commercial on-ride photo systems, and could then select key photos that would be attached to a standard template in order to produce a souvenir photo story for a specific ride experience. The original project produced the first implementation of this idea via a mobile phone application, which was quickly trialled at Alton Towers with a few groups of visitors. This produced high quality research papers (including a best paper at ACM CHI 2011) and also enabled an innovation workshop to be held at Nottingham in May 2011, from which several ideas for further development emerged.
AutomicsII seeks to carry some of these ideas forward. In particular, we aim to create a more scalable and automated Automics service that lives in the cloud and that can therefore potentially be deployed by a variety of visitor attractions who, as subscribers, would be able to create and edit their own photostory templates and location-based triggers and also feed the resulting photo stories into their own souvenir and marketing channels.
Partners: HP, Nottingham Forest
Horizon Digital Economy Research, University of
Nottingham Innovation Park, Triumph Road, Nottingham,
NG7 2TU
horizon@nottingham.ac.uk
