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Where’s everybody? Comparing the use of heatmaps to uncover cities’ tacit social context in smartphones and pervasive displays

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Abstract

We introduce HotCity, a city-wide social context crowdsourcing platform that utilises user’s current location and geo-tagged social data (e.g., check-ins, “likes” and ratings) to autonomously obtain insight on a city’s tacit social awareness (e.g., “when is best time and where to go out on a Saturday night?”). HotCity is available as a mobile application for Android and as an interactive application on pervasive large displays, showcasing a heatmap of social buzz. We present the results of an in-the-field evaluation with 30 volunteers, of which 27 are tourists of the mobile app, compare it to a previous evaluation of the pervasive display app and also present usage data of free use of the pervasive display app over 3 years in the city of Oulu, Finland. Our data demonstrate that HotCity can communicate effectively the city’s current social buzz, without affecting digital maps’ cartography information. Our empirical analysis highlights a change in tourists’ foci when exploring the city using HotCity. We identify a transition from “individual [places]” to “good [areas]” and “people [choices]”. Our contributions are threefold: a long-term deployment of a city-wide social context crowdsourcing platform; an in-the-field evaluation of HotCity on mobile devices and pervasive displays; and an evaluation of cities’ tacit knowledge as social context as a denominator in city planning and for the development of future mobile social-aware applications.

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Notes

  1. http://docs.ubioulu.fi/.

  2. Mapex heatmap library https://github.com/chemalarrea/Mapex.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially funded by the Academy of Finland (Grants 276786-AWARE, 285062-iCYCLE, 286386-CPDSS, 285459-iSCIENCE), and the European Commission (Grants PCIG11-GA-2012-322138, 645706-GRAGE, and 6AIKA-A71143-AKAI).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, Patras, Greece

    Andreas Komninos, Jeries Besharat & John Garofalakis

  2. Computer Technology Institute and Press “Diophantus”, Rion, Patras, Greece

    Jeries Besharat & John Garofalakis

  3. Center for Ubiquitous Computing, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

    Denzil Ferreira & Vassilis Kostakos

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  1. Andreas Komninos
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  2. Jeries Besharat
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  3. Denzil Ferreira
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  4. John Garofalakis
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  5. Vassilis Kostakos
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Correspondence to Andreas Komninos.

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Komninos, A., Besharat, J., Ferreira, D. et al. Where’s everybody? Comparing the use of heatmaps to uncover cities’ tacit social context in smartphones and pervasive displays. Inf Technol Tourism 17, 399–427 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-017-0092-5

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