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Macau Map : Next Generation Mobile Travelling Assistant  Robert P Biuk-Aghai University of Macau Macau S A R robertb@umac.mo Abstract This paper reports on the development of the next generation of the MacauMap handheld digital tourist guide application. MacauMap is a tourism-oriented map application for the Macau territory. It includes common map viewing and navigation functions, searching functions, hotel, restaurant, and tourist guides (including photos), a bi-lingual (English/Chinese) interface, and other features. The original version of MacauMap was designed for low-performance personal digital assistants (PDAs) running PalmOS. It was later modified for PDAs running the Pocket PC operating system. The current version has undergone a complete re-design to make it operate on mobile phones running Symbian OS.The development of this mobile phone-based version of MacauMap was faced with a number of new challenges: firstly, mobile phones are even more resource-constrained than PDAs, in terms of processor speed, available memory, and screen size. Therefore, in order to achieve acceptable performance, we had to develop new efficient techniques for storing and retrieving map data, and for calculating and drawing maps. Secondly, another major challenge of mobile phones is the severely restricted user interface, as compared to PDAs. With few exceptions, most mobile phones on the market today allow user interaction via hardware keys only, instead of the touch screen common on PDAs. Therefore, in order to achieve a user-friendly and usable user interface, we developed a number of new user interaction techniques. With these techniques, the same functions offered by previous PDA-based versions of MacauMap are also available on the new mobile phone version of the application.Moreover, the mobile phone version includes several enhancements over previous versions of MacauMap. It allows users to add points of interest to the map, including a text description as well as a digital photo captured using the phone’s built-in camera. Another new feature is a tour guide with suggested walking tours through the tourist areas of Macau. The current PDA-based version of MacauMap has proven to be a success with tourists and locals alike, having been downloaded nearly 100,000 times within the past year. It is expected that the new version of MacauMap will continue this success, and thereby promote tourism in the Macau territory. |