77 Mass Ave

Continued from page 4

Venice Unmasked
Handheld devices will guide tourists through unexplored parts of the city
By Laura Levis

The historic center of Venice, Italy, teems with tourists year-round—visiting the Piazza San Marco, taking boat rides down the celebrated canals, buying decorative carnival masks at the dozens of shops that have sprung up in recent years. While the tourism boom of the past 40-odd years has been an economic boon to the city, it also has a downside. Tourism has put stress on the transportation system, and in the city center, it has brought pollution and in general made living conditions very unpleasant. In order to help alleviate the problem, the Regione Veneto Office of Tourism in Venice turned to two graduate students in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program. Michael Epstein and Cristobal Garcia have been studying the behaviors of both locals and tourists in order to design wireless handheld devices that could lure throngs of tourists from the overcrowded center of the city into less visited neighborhoods, easing congestion and introducing visitors to more of Venice’s culture and history than just the mask shops.

“Tourists need to get deeper, and go beyond the surface experience of the main attractions of the gondolas and boats to find the hidden secrets,” Epstein says. He and Garcia left for Venice in June 2003 to spend four months investigating how a mobile information system for tourists might work in the city. They interviewed hundreds of guides, tourists, locals, and city officials to get a sense of what types of media would be most effective and well received.

Epstein and Garcia have proposed Global Positioning System–enabled cell phones that tourists can rent at local tourism stands around the city. The phones will display images and graphics, including maps that indicate a user’s exact location, and they will store information such as names of nearby restaurants, museum hours, and blurbs about local hot spots. But even more important, the devices will help tourists explore hidden parts of Venice, such as secret gardens and the interiors of palaces. “Basically, it could be something like an audiovisual walking tour, with little exercises for the tourists to experience that will make them aware of how the city is laid out,” says Epstein. For example, the device might guide a tourist into a salami shop, where it would play a video of an interview with the owner talking about the history of the store.

Epstein and Garcia are talking with several cell phone manufacturers who are interested in providing devices as platforms for the technology. Longer term, the students hope that, using the Venetian system as a model, they can spin off their graduate project into a company called History Unwired and bring their technology to other parts of Europe.