View all news

Sharing places

Press release issued: 22 June 2006

Mista’s technology means that as you walk through the physical environment, a diverse range of digital media experiences augment the ambience and bring these spaces alive.

Remember the ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’?  It always knew where you were, giving you information about the planet that you had accidentally landed on, alongside the friendly caution “Don’t Panic!” The Guide also embodied a digital landscape overlaying the physical world.

Now technology from new company Mista Ltd, a University of Bristol spin out company, brings the Guide one step closer to reality through your laptop, mobile phone or PDA.  Mista’s technology means that as you walk through the physical environment, a diverse range of digital media experiences augment the ambience and bring these spaces alive.

Tony Rush, CEO of Mista Ltd commented, “In 12-18 months time, location-aware devices will be in widespread use through PDAs and mobile phone handsets.  We are excited about leading the way with Sharing Places and encourage you to play and experiment with our new service.”

Associating places in the real world with digital content is an exciting development that combines location technology with a new digital medium.  It allows people to share their experiences and opinions about locations – for example, a person going on holiday can use the technology to record audio and visual commentary about specific locations and this route can then be recommended to friends visiting the same area.

James Lancaster, Head of the Technology Transfer team at the University of Bristol added,” There is a growing marketing for information on the move.  Mista’s innovative web applications provide a step change in the usability and accessibility of this information.  This is personalised and tailored technology at its very best.”

The possibilities of this new technology are endless; imagine a Sony Pictures Da Vinci Code tour of Paris; a Disney tour of the Grand Canyon; or a Hertz tour of San Francisco delivering high-quality audio and video content as users move to different locations.

To celebrate this pioneering technology, Mista Ltd have launched Sharing Places (www.sharing-places.com), a new web application which enables and encourages you to attach text, photo, video and audio to locations in the real world to produce digital mediascapes.  These devices form trails that can be accessed over the web or downloaded to a suitable device (e.g. PDA) and experienced in the real world.  The trails can be tagged, published for others to find, remixed and shared.

 

Edit this page