Initial Designs

Point of View:

Arjun is a 40 years old father living in Mumbai, India whose son Raj is a working professional recently moved to San Francisco.

Arjun wants to recreate the narratives of his son's stories and better understand the place where his son lives.

Raj talks to Arjun nearly every day using Skype. During these conversations, Raj tells Arjun interesting stories:

Raj also shares some images and posts on Facebook/Twitter describing his experiences.

When Raj is busy and unavailable to talk, Arjun wishes to recreate the stories that Raj has told him. He wants to learn more about San Francisco.

Raj's parents and friends back home want to create the narratives of his stories.

When Arjun and Raj communicate in real time, Arjun would like more contextual information about the locations and events that Raj mentions.
Arjun wants to catch up on the content that Raj has posted about his life in San Francisco when Raj is not around and "replay" stories that Raj has told to him in the past.
Arjun wants to be able to explore the places that Raj has visited in an intuitive way.



This is an ultra-efficient interface. Also, it will work for illiterate users. Very simple idea -- Arjun calls Raj using Teleport. Teleport has in-built location recognizer that recognizes location names in realtime and displays a 3-D view of the locations. No user input required -- the service runs in the background. Safety Issue: Some locations might not be interesting. User doesn't have control over which locations to see, which not. Also, if the location is incorrectly identified, there is no way to correct it.	This tries to address the safety issue, by compromising a little bit of efficiency. Instead of directly opening the location, it generates a transcript of the call in realtime and highlights all the recognized locations. Hovering over the highlighted locations open the location in the 3D location window. It's safe as user can correct the location (if system recognizes it incorrectly) and thus would show only correct locations. Also, user has the control over which locations to see and which not to see.	This is a different kind if interface that gives users more control. It is a direct manipulation interface that les user explore any location they want. It also allows simulate walking or driving. It allows changing speed, pause, and resume. It stretches to ultra-safe as user can asynchronously explore a location.



This interface allows Arjun to follow the photos that Raj posts during his travels. This interface organizes photographs geographically and in clusters. Because the photographs are laid out in this manner, Arjun is able to understand the spatial relationships between the photographs.	This design allows Arjun to keep up with Raj's social media (e.g. microblog) posts. This interface allows Arjun to play back a log of the events that Raj has participated in at his new home.	This interface is similar to the first sketch, in that it presents the user with a set of geotagged photographs. However, this interface is much simplified. Instead of being presented all of the photographs at once, the user is shown photographs one-at-a-time with some geographical imagery shown in the background. This interface has the benefit of being extremely safe and extremely learnable, as it narrows down the actions that must be performed by the user to "Follow Me". In addition, this interface would also be suitable for illiterate users, as information about the location is mainly conveyed verbally, through spoken narration that accompanies each photograph.