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Sharing economy and contemporary tourism are two emerging concepts that urge to be investigated together with new ubiquitous and immersive technologies, in the tourism and hospitality sector. In this rich scenario, we designed and implemented ShareCities, a platform to foster remote direct information exchange and meaningful interactions among tourists and locals. Exploiting ShareCities we here present an extended analysis on the opportunity to use people-to-people recommendation criteria based on proximity. We hence defined three criteria which drove our analysis: i) profile similarity, ii) geographical proximity, and iii) random exploration. Through an online questionnaire, we collect answers from 126 young-adult students, obtaining a general positive interest in the three criteria but also concerns in terms of privacy, trust, and feeling of disorientation.

Transmedia Stories are becoming an increasingly important technique for the tourism industry. They are successful tools to engage, inspire and gather audiences online and offline. In this article, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of Fragments of Laura, a bespoke Transmedia Storytelling (TS) experience designed to involve visitors in developing knowledge and awareness about the cultural and natural heritage of Madeira Island. Fragments of Laura (FoL) is composed of two interconnected components: a Location-Aware Multimedia Story, and a Hypermedia Platform populated with locally collected testimonies and interviews. Results from the extensive evaluation of Fragments of Laura, highlights the potential of interactive multimedia, TS in particular, in engaging tourists with the destination values and community. Our contribution is twofold, on one hand we extend on the state of the art of multimedia interactive storytelling, with the description of the Fragments of Laura TS artifact. On the other hand, results from FoL evaluation highlight how the artifact impacts on the tourism experience its implications for the design of future tourism driven TS experiences.

Sharing economy and contemporary tourism are two emerging concepts that urge to be investigated together with new ubiquitous and immersive technologies, in the tourism and hospitality sector. In this rich scenario, we designed and implemented ShareCities, a platform to foster remote direct information exchange and meaningful interactions among tourists and locals. Exploiting ShareCities we here present an extended analysis on the opportunity to use people-to-people recommendation criteria based on proximity. We hence defined three criteria which drove our analysis: i) profile similarity, ii) geographical proximity, and iii) random exploration. Through an online questionnaire, we collect answers from 126 young-adult students, obtaining a general positive interest in the three criteria but also concerns in terms of privacy, trust, and feeling of disorientation.

This paper presents a study on urban data crowdsourcing driven by Geo-Zombie, a multimedia mobile application we designed and developed to engage pedestrians in taking note of urban architectural impediments and facilities by documenting them through pictures and multimedia data. Geo-Zombie aims at transforming the civic activity of contributing into a virtual gamified experience where players attempt to escape from horrific situations in which zombies are ready to cannibalize unsuspecting walkers. In some sense, walkers that kill zombies deeply reconnect with the concept of imminent danger which can be fought resorting to appropriate civic actions. To challenge our initial hypotheses we conducted a design process, starting with a concept generation where three different concepts were discussed which gave rise to five different multimedia mobile apps including the one with zombies. Then, focus group, experience prototyping, application design and implementation, and finally field trials were exploited to refine the design and to select the best apps out of the five that better responded to the need of involving common people in collecting urban accessibility data. It is worth noting that the experiences of use with 50 avid walkers have demonstrated that a multimedia mobile app with maps and zombies can be a concrete step towards a social inclusion strategy while inviting new reflections and discussions on the issue of urban data crowdsourcing.