Accessing located media through new forms of personal device: a public dialogue

This project builds on existing work at the University of Bristol in providing tools to simplify the process of authoring located media, i.e. to allow members of the public to locate sounds, images and the like in particular places, leaving them there for others to acquire. State of the art mobile and wearable computing is starting to move beyond basic located media towards embodied computing, robotics, mobile vision and visualisation. Through a series of workshops and community sessions, we hope to seed an initial pool of public expertise in existing located media systems to sufficiently ground public debate on these newer developments. Such a programme will parallel advances on existing broadcasting work in public engagement with history (e.g. `people's war'), and wildlife (e.g. 'spring watch') to encourage personal participation in, and contribution to, the personal and mobile robotics of the future. This approach builds on our engagement with target audiences as part of the Mobile Bristol programme and the Equator IRC, which together allow us to draw on technical work and equipment for this process, including supported software releases. We hope this will result in public input to the future research process as well as understanding of current results.