Moodlog: Touring in mood of place

This paper presents an interdisciplinary study on social science and computing technology to build a novel touring system toward representing the inner mood of place for the tourists. Ordinary touring systems are generally considering touring as introducing a place with descriptive information. Instead, the proposed system, Moodlog, brings "mood of place" into an ordinary touring scheme, opening up a new aspect of touring, leading to a deeper understanding of a place for tourists. This research introduces three design principles for Moodlog which are: (1) Place Regarded as Human, (2) Experiencing a Great Diversity of Place, and (3) Touring in Mood of Place. The basic idea of the work is we treating a place as a human being to communicate with the tourists. Specifically, Moodlog collects "mood of place" by information tagged by people living and travelling there. People have unique sense of place, which is able to contribute to the place by tagging their mood with digital media such as music, and photo and video taken there. This makes the place have its own mood, turning a passive place to be active as a human. Expressing the mood of place to a tourist's first visiting is just like the place being a human talking about its feeling and the stories it experienced to the tourist. Notably, the place is considered with multiple personalities because tourists have distinct feelings to the same place. Experiencing each personality of the place is just like talking to many people. For mood representation, music, color, photos, and videos are used to create a meaningful atmosphere for the user to easily get immersed in mood of place. Moodlog is implemented with a location-aware orientation-aware camera PDA held by the user during a tour. Additionally, a panorama-based user interface is introduced to help the user interact with the physical environment and the virtual memory of the place. A preliminary study for the system deploying in a university campus shows that the participants are interested in the new touring experience.