eLens
eLens
on-the-spot contextual urban information
eLens is a mobile phone application that allows citizens to interact with their urban environment. Users can tag the city and post messages in physical places. Examples of its functions include civic participation in governmental decision making, social networking and in the cultural life or the emergence of ad-hoc local communities. Simply by pointing their mobile device to a building or any other tagged location, users can access to the eLens network and leave or retrieve information in form of text, voice, image or movie. eLens augments the physical environment through location based information.
In spring 2006, ELens was brought to high school students at IES-SEP Lacetania (Manresa, Catalunya / Spain) who tested the tool and explored its potential when tagging their city and generating stories along architectural tourist routes. eLens was conceived and developed over two academic semesters, in collaboration and with the kind support of Generalitat de Catalunya, Telefonica, Motorola and Cisco.
Design Process →
Brief
During the first part of the workshop, we have explored not only challenging technological and interface design issues, but also conceptual ideas concerning the electronically augmented pedestrian and related social and cultural issues.
Barcelona is the pedestrian-oriented Mediterranean setting for exploring general ideas. Our collaborator—the Generalitat de Catalunya—has a long tradition of engaging citizen participation and they sought to strengthen citizen-government collaboration through this project. We grappled with questions about the role of eLens in the government. How can we strike the right balance between facilitating grassroots initiatives and a bureaucratic supply of information?
Concept Generation
We started with a simple concept. Take a wireless device with a bit of location- and direction-awareness, and use it to unlock the secrets of the city. We think of eLens as something of a viewfinder—whatever’s in the frame is what the person is interested in. It picks out things in the world that a person wants to learn more about and then superimposes the retrieved information on the thing she’s looking at. The motion is quick and casual, and slips easily into the point-and-shoot culture of camera-phones. In this way, eLens enhances the value of the city for its citizens by making their environs more accessible, more culturally vibrant, more socially just, and by giving people a way to be more connected to each other.
We began by generating some simple ideas for the device, but further issues arise. How do we design an elegant, clear interface that delivers sophisticated services? How can we make a device that is more than cool and fun to use, but also harnesses social capital in the city? Then we explored urban philosophy and the tension between those who recognize the city as a series of landmarks and those who are interested in learning about the brick that the landmark is made of. What are the objects that we’re pointing at? Are they commercial things, graffiti things, people, buildings, entire city blocks?
Prototyping
During this workshop we designed, implemented, and tested in Manresa, Spain, a prototype eLens that provides pedestrians with immediate, on-the-spot, geographically and temporarily contextualized information.
The eLens is implemented on a mobile phone platform with a very simple, intuitive interface, and incorporates location and orientation awareness.
We are developed eLens for use with the Motorola A1000. The A1000 uses the Symbian operating system and has an assisted global positioning system (A-GPS), a 1.2 mega-pixel camera, a separate video conferencing camera, a large 208x320 color touch screen, 3G communications (~300 kbps down / ~100 kbps up in Barcelona), and high-capacity on its transflash data storage (>= 256 MB). The ultimate decision about how to design eLens technology depended on five elements: where you are, what you’re looking at, who you’re interacting with, how you’re communicating, and what information you’re exchanging.
