TourGuide – A Navigation System for Ski Tourers on GPS-enabled Smartphones.
Günter Kiechle, Nicolas Göll, Karl Rehrl (2007): TourGuide – A Navigation System for Ski Tourers on GPS-enabled Smartphones. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on LBS & TeleCartography, Hong Kong, 2007
Ski touring is a well-established leisure activity in the Alps and featured
steadily growing popularity over the last years. Next to good skiing skills
and physical fitness it requires high awareness of the risks of mountain
environments in winter since it involves navigation through potential
avalanche terrain.
In this paper we are going to report the results of the project TourGuide
dealing with the development of a location based mobile service for ski
tourers and its evaluation in a field trial. The service provides a
map-based view of prearranged tours including multi-channel navigation
instructions as well as multimedia information about points of interest
nearby. Navigation instructions may consist of text messages, spoken
instructions or vibration hints. Regions of high risk according to the
avalanche report are highlighted in the map and in a 3D view of the
selected tour. The TourGuide is intended to run on off-the-shelf
Java-enabled smartphones preferably featuring built-in GPS receivers and it
works with both on- and offline data.
To evaluate the service a real world field trial was conducted in the
provice of Salzburg. Several ski tourers performed a hands-on test of the
TourGuide and reported their feedback using a thinking-aloud technique.
Additional subsequent interviews with the test persons brought forward
substantial and comprehensive feedback.
