Phygital Map: Accessing Digital Multimedia from Physical Map

We present an augmented map interface called Phygital (physical, digital) Map that enables users to access digital multimedia stored in various off-the-shelf devices from physically printed maps, such as wall-mounted maps and atlas books. While the rapidly expanding variety of multimedia devices has been facilitated capturing the real world events through various digital media, the interface for playback of these digital media is not well integrated into the physical world. Phygital map addresses this difficulty by providing an interface that is capable of triggering and controlling multimedia devices and the network data sources, based on interactions on a printed map surface. Key features of Phygital map are use of off-the-shelf devices for both media manipulations and the interface to make applications pervasive, an adoption of inexpensive positioning devices as tangible artifacts on maps, and an extensible infrastructure that can cope with varying devices built on growing number of middleware platforms. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of Phygital map, and the ease of using it for multimedia exploration applications.