The whole world under your feet: field trial of embodied browsing of geotagged content

Abstract

Location-based services are increasingly popular, and the Earth has become covered with geotagged data. To assess a novel approach to access this information, we conducted a field trial of a mobile mixed reality application called MAA, which operates on a mobile phone. MAA displays a view through the Earth and geospatial content in the direction to which the user is pointing the device. In this paper, we report the results of the two-week long field trial of MAA. We found that the embodied usage of MAA is experienced as engaging and surprising, but may also be cumbersome in some usage situations. Virtual viewing of locations around the planet was considered pleasant. MAA was often shown to friends, and was used for watching visual materials and searching for information about cities. MAA was found to be a promising platform for many kinds of location-based content, especially for real-time events and local information.