Automics - Open Lab, Newcastle University

“Automics” - Assisted Mobile Authoring of Photostories as Souvenirs of a Day in the Park Duncan Rowland, Abigail Durrant, Joel Fischer, Dave Kirk, Steve Benford, Derek McAuley Horizon Centre for Digital Economy Research University of Nottingham Nottingham, UK, NG81BB ABSTRACT This paper describes a prototype digital economy service that generates ‘photostory’ souvenirs for group day-trips to an amusement park. Location-based triggers prompt visitors to use their mobile phones to capture, share and annotate photos during the day. Selected photos are combined with professional photos from on-ride capture systems and a template is used to generate a bespoke photostory - an “Automic” souvenir. The design of this prototype system was informed by an ethnographic study of park visiting, and this is discussed along with directions for future work. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Information Systems] Group and Organization Interfaces – Collaborative Computing. General Terms Human Factors, Design Keywords Photostories, digital photographs, amusement park, ethnography

comics,

souvenirs,

INTRODUCTION An important aspect of visiting an amusement park or similar entertainment of cultural attraction is generating a record of the experience, most notably through the taking or sharing of photographs. Consequently, parks and allied companies have invested heavily in automated photosystems that aim to capture a unique image of a rider during their ride that no one else can take and then sell it to them afterwards, often as a physical printed photograph that is made instantly available at a kiosk at the end of the ride (e.g., [2]). At the same time, visitors enjoy using their own cameras to take photos of one another throughout the day, and are increasingly turning to social networking services to share these with one another. This constitutes a significant business challenge for companies developing photo-capture technologies who increasingly need to consider how their traditional printed photo services might integrate with the wider world of personal photography and social networking. This paper reports on a project to prototype new digital economy services that mix automatically Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Digital Futures’10, October 11 – 12, 2010, Nottingham, UK. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).

captured photos from rides with visitors’ own documentation of their day to create new forms of souvenir that add value to both. The approach involves the automatic generation of comic-book style photo-stories by groups of visitors. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF PHOTO SHARING

The project began with an ethnographic study of visitors’ actual photo sharing practices during and after a visit to a theme park, in this case, Alton Towers [1]. Three groups of visitors were recruited, two extended families and a group of friends. The groups were observed during a day-trip to a theme park and semi-structured interviews were conducted afterwards. This work revealed the importance of taking and sharing photographs for these groups and helped identify requirements for future digital economy services. In particular, it was observed that: • taking photographs is in and of itself an enjoyable aspect of the experience – not just a chore – and visitors invest considerable effort in this. • the role of group photographer is often taken on by ‘spectators’, members of the group who do not wish to go on a particular ride. The park provides spectator viewpoints for major rides. • visitors document many activities beyond the rides themselves. Indeed, the park deliberately provides photo opportunities in the form of physical props at key locations away from actual rides. • photos are used to mark key ‘rites of passage’ such as a child going on their first big ride. There can be tensions around this, for example between riders who wish to portray themselves as brave (e.g. younger riders) and others who might be amused by seeing them look more scared (e.g., parents). It seems that different members of a party may wish to choose photos that support their own individual accounts of the experience. • related to this, taking photos can be a playful activity, for example, trying to capture others looking scared and then teasing them about this. • visitors are interested in the automatically captured photographs, but cost can be a barrier, and they are not always able to judge the value of a particular photograph to them until later on in the visit. THE ‘AUTOMICS’ PROTOTYPE

In response to these findings, a prototype digital economy service has been developed, called Automics (assisted or automatically generated ‘photostories’ or comics). This service creates personalised photostories as mementoes of a

visit to an amusement park. The overall approach to the work has been inspired by the observation that comics – or sequential art as they might be more formally known – can offer a powerful but concise way of telling stories, mixing images and text, presenting simple narratives, and yet being rendered in a static form that would be suitable for display around the home (e.g., as a picture or poster), in a traditional book, or even printed onto a T-shirt or other physical souvenir (although there is also growing interest in interactive forms of comics, including on mobile phones) [3]. An iterative development process is being followed during which the Automics prototype is being developed through a series of field tests at Alton Towers involving members of the public. This paper documents an early iteration following a first public test in July 2010. A group of park visitors used a dedicated application running on an Android mobile phone to capture, share and annotate photos during a day-long visit to the park. All captured photos are made available to the entire group. Annotation involves creating and positioning comic style speech bubbles on a photo. Visitors can initiate taking and annotating photos at any time. In addition, the system also implements location triggers (using GPS) to actively prompt visitors to capture photos at key locations (e.g., near to major rides and at other known photo points around the park) and also to annotate at other key locations (e.g., while waiting in a queue for a ride – one of the major challenges for parks – or during lunch at an eatery). Finally, a webbased interface is employed via a browser view embedded in the application to allow users to select images for inclusion in their own bespoke photostory. The prototype uses a set of predefined templates (one for each ride) to combine visitors’ selected and annotated photos with an image from the ride’s on-board photo capture system as well as other stock branded material to automatically generate a single page photostory of each ride. The structure of each template involves a ‘before’ photo taken by the visitors, a ‘during’ photo taken by the ride system and an ‘after’ photo taken by the visitors. The final task for each visitor is therefore to choose ‘before’ and ‘after’ images for each ride from the group’s shared photo pool. The system then automatically generates a distinct photostory page for each individual visitor. Figure 1 shows example photostories that were generated by the prototype, and describes the method of image compositionthat constitutes the final rendering. Enabling visitors to create their own personal photostories (even where these use images that were captured and/or annotated by others) meets an important requirement raised by the ethnographic study and noted previously. Additional work is underway that is exploring methods that generate a combined “Day in the Park” group photostory based on a combination of the most popular or interesting images across a group of visitors. At present, a photo sorting task is

employed to allow each group to collaboratively select images they would like to use in a ‘group poster’ (presently constructed manually). Analysis of the decision process and criteria will inform the design of an automatic selection mechanism that will be implemented in future versions of the prototype. NEXT STEPS

Beyond iteratively refining and extending the current Automics prototype, the remainder of the project will involve further activities to evaluate it from both experiential and business perspectives. Experientially, quantitative measures of use will accompany ethnographic observation. Post-event interviews with groups of visitors – family and friends – together with videos recording actual use in the park will reveal their attitudes towards photostories as souvenirs and will also reveal details of how they wish to select and annotate images. Of particular interest is the opportunity to explore divergences between different individual and group portrayals of events. From a digital economy perspective, an ‘innovation workshop’ is planned in which various commercial partners from along the value chain for theme park visiting in general and souvenirs in particular (e.g., parks, ride photo systems, printing systems and social networking) will use the Automics prototype as a catalyst for envisaging and discussing future digital economy services and business models in this space. Looking to the longer term future, there is the potential to apply these techniques to other kinds of visiting experience and possibly more widely in other sectors of the digital economy and well as exploring the potential of interactive (online, consumption via mobile device, iPad, PSP[5]) as well as paper renditions of personal and group photostories. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the RCUK-funded Horizon centre for Digital Economy Research, the contributions of their partners Alton Towers and Picsolve, and also the time and effort of the participants in the studies and field tests. REFERENCES 1. Alton Towers website: http://www.altontowers.com/, verified July 2010 2. Picsolve website: http://www.picsolve.com/, verified July 2010 3. Rowland, D., Porter, D., Gibson, M., Walker, K., Kevin, Underwood, J., Luckin, R., Smith, H., Fitzpatrick, G., Good, J., Walker, B., Chamberlain, A., Rennick Egglestone, S., Marshall, J., Schnadelbach, H., Benford, S., “Sequential art for science and CHI”, Proc CHI 2010 Extended Abstracts, Atlanta, 2010, doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753848 4. ImageMagick website: http://www.imagemagick.org, verified July 2010 5. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/756b87e0-668d-11dfaeb1-00144feab49a.html verified July 2010

1: Media Theme Templates A background image is created in advance. This contains a standard set of panels that are consistent for all participants

2: “On-Ride” Panel A Picsolve image is automatically pasted (composited) on this background template (using server-side php and ImageMagick [4])

3: User Images To create the final image, photos taken (and annotated) by party members are selected by a user through a web page accessible on their mobile phone. ‘Before Ride’ and ‘After Ride’ images are selected. These are then composed on the server to create the finished Automic image. This is then photo-printed and framed, ready for collection as the group exits the park.

Figure 1 shows the process by which the collection of theme media, picsolve on-ride photos and user images are combined by a user using their mobile phone to create an “automic”.