Patrizia Marti University of Siena marti@media.unisi.it

Luca Petroni University of Siena petroni@media.unisi.it

Alberto Bianchi University of Siena alby@ing.unisi.it

Massimo Zancanaro IRST-ITC zancana@irst.itc.it

The HIPS project is developing a hand-held location-aware tour guide which allows visitors to a city or a museum to enter and access personalised information on places or works of art. The presentation of information using the HIPS system is dynamically-generated, adaptive and integrated with maps and spatial directions.

Adaptation is a key feature of the system, and in order to build information presentations adapted to the needs and interests of the user from an existing repository of information, the data need to be appropriately structured and annotated. We have developed a way of annotating a set of repositories of data which makes explicit the content of each piece of information, as well as the relations that hold between different pieces of information. Our aim is to make this formalism general enough to annotate different kinds of data (for example text, audio, video, and images) but at present we are focussing on audio and images only.

At our project review in Siena on 22-23 March 1999 we provided a live demonstration of a system prototype in the Museo Civico. In this first prototype, adaptation is mainly based on the physical movements of the visitors; in future versions we will incorporate other categories. Field studies by Veron and Levasseur have shown that although visitors have their own personal way of approaching museums and artworks, it is possible to classify single types of behaviour using a small set of categories, based on the visitors' movements, the time they spend in front of a single artwork, and the overall time they spend within the exhibition space. An additional variable we considered is the notion of "affordance" of an artwork its capacity to attract attention because of its importance, dimension, or position. Although the first HIPS prototype demonstrates only the basic ideas of the whole system, its implementation was a big challenge for our consortium. At the review in Nyborg we were asked to allow for a development phase of about one year, and this had far-reaching consequences for our workplan. Some of us had mixed feelings about this at the time, but we can now say that the effort has been worthwhile. The Siena demo provided us with the opportunity to verify the feasibility of our ideas, and has given us fresh energy to move ahead.

Our next milestone will be the i3 Annual Conference, which will take place in Siena in October of this year, where we are planning to organise another live demonstration on the basis of a more stable system and new functions.

HIPS web site: http://marconi.ltt.dii.unisi.it/progetti/HIPS/