Accessibility
 

Advancing mobile storytelling with Adobe's distributable player solution


Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. From conference guide to mTourism
  3. Adobe MAX application and developing for the distributable player
  4. Futures

From conference guide to mTourism

The MAX guide was a way to dip our toes into a solution to critical problems in Flash Lite development and distribution, which Untravel first discovered in Venice, Italy in 2004. It was there that we developed an unconventional neighborhood guide delivered over Flash–enabled mobile devices. The project (see: http://web.mit.edu/frontiers) was sponsored by the regional office of tourism and implemented on Motorola A1000s with a Flash 4-5 custom version running on a touchscreen phone. The resulting mapped stories brought tourists into small alleyways of a more isolated part of Venice and introduced them to craftsmen and local artists such as gondola builders, glass blowers, and ska musicians who sing in traditional Venetian dialect. The rich media combination of maps, images, sound, and video was a challenge in this version of Flash, as the video portions of the tour could only run in the native video player on the devices, which wouldn't auto-close on completion. Also, the tour had to be sideloaded to devices, and thus couldn't be spontaneously streamed to mobile devices. In the end, only a rental version of the tour could be implemented in Venice.

After that experience, Untravel began developing software that made it easy to develop synched multimedia walking tours on top of digital maps (www.untravelmedia.com/software), but again, the resulting Flash Lite 2.0 content could only be side-loaded and could not properly run video. Our productions (for instance, http://www.cambridge-usa.org/global/mobile.php—see Figure 2) sold as iPod versions, but there was no uptake of the Flash Lite solution, except by watching it online via desktop browsers.

Beyond the Yard, one of Untravel Media's early Flash Lite tours

Figure 2. Beyond the Yard, one of Untravel Media's early Flash Lite tours

With the advent of the distributable player solution, we are potentially able to distribute both player and content completely over the air: that is, a 20 MB tour may be downloaded initially as a player application under 500 KB that installs the latest Flash Lite Player and streams in the audio, images, and video as the tour progresses. The geo-coding of content could also set up intelligent ways to download content depending on location.

Page 2 of 4
Previous Page
Next Page