Place-tagged Podcasts with Synchronized Maps on Mobile Media Players

PodWalks are a new kind of Podcasts where virtual narrators guide users through real-world spaces. PodWalks can increase a user's appreciation of real spaces by connecting them to audio tours stored on portable media players that can be listened to any time and anywhere without using mobile telecommunication services. One disadvantage of PodWalks is that it can be difficult for listeners to synchronize their locations with the location that the narrator is describing and, as a result, listeners become disoriented. To solve this problem we propose a new framework—maPodWalks—as an extension to PodWalks which provides maps that are synchronized to the narrations on mobile media players. By forming linkages between virtual and real-world experiences, maPodWalks help users develop mental maps of places of interest. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics of maPodWalks and present a prototype maPodWalk Maker that allows users to easily create geocoded audio tours. The results of system tests comparing the performance of PodWalks and maPodWalks are reported as well.