In this work we present a mobile application we designed and engineered to enable people to log their travels near and far, leave notes behind, and build a community around spaces in between destinations. Our design explores new ground for location-based social computing systems, identifying opportunities where these systems can foster the growth of on-line communities rooted at non-places. In our work we develop, explore, and evaluate several innovative features designed around four usage scenarios: daily commuting, long-distance traveling, quantified traveling, and journaling. We present the results of two small-scale user studies, and one large-scale, world-wide deployment, synthesizing the results as potential opportunities and lessons learned in designing social computing for non-places.
Designers of social computing technologies have grappled with the concept of places for quite some time. In 1996, Harrison and Dourish @cite_1 argued for the importance in distinguishing between places" and spaces," with a special emphasis on the virtual. Ten years later, Dourish @cite_7 restates these concepts in the context of spatial technologies.
@cite_1 @cite_7
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In the ten years since the distinction between "place" and "space" emerged as a consideration for CSCW researchers and designers, the concepts have proven useful across a range of domains. In that same period of time, wireless and mobile technologies have given us new sites at which to examine the issues of space, practice, and mobility. These changes suggest that it might be fruitful to re-examine the issues of place and space in light of recent developments. In particular, the nature of space and spatiality deserve further consideration. Many collaborative and communicative environments use notions of “space” and spatial organisation to facilitate and structure interaction. We argue that a focus on spatial models is misplaced. Drawing on understandings from architecture and urban design, as well as from our own research findings, we highlight the critical distinction between “space” and “place”. While designers use spatial models to support interaction, we show how it is actually a notion of “place” which frames interactive behaviour. This leads us to re-evaluate spatial systems, and discuss how “place”, rather than “space”, can support CSCW design. A place is a locale that is frequently visited by an individual user and carries important semantic meanings (e.g. home, work, etc.). Many location-aware applications will be greatly enhanced with the ability of the automatic discovery of personally semantic places. The discovery of a user's personally semantic places involves obtaining the physical locations and semantic meanings of these places. In this paper, we propose approaches to address both of the problems. For the physical place extraction problem, a hierarchical clustering algorithm is proposed to firstly extract visit points from the GPS trajectories, and then these visit points can be clustered to form physical places. For the semantic place recognition problem, Bayesian networks (encoding the temporal patterns in which the places are visited) are used in combination with a customized POI (i.e. place of interest) database (containing the spatial features of the places) to categorize the extracted physical places into pre-defined types. An extensive set of experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches based on a dataset of real-world GPS trajectories. A visible area detection method that depends on online available information is proposed.Visual popularity and sentiment are calculated based on images and their accompanying text that people share in social mediaThe visual popularity information is presented in a 3D virtual environment using Unreal engine. Display Omitted This paper proposes to use a geotagged virtual world for the visualization of peoples visual interest and their sentiment as captured from their social network activities. Using mobile devices, people widely share their experiences and the things they find interesting through social networks. We experimentally show that accumulating information over a period of time from multiple social network users allows to efficiently map and visualize popular landmarks as found in cities such as Rome in Italy and Dublin in Ireland. The proposed approach is also sensitive to temporal and spatial events that attract visual attention. We visualize the calculated popularity on 3D virtual cities using game engine technologies.