stroll – a passive navigation system for exhibition spaces

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Huge fairs and exhibitions can easily become overwhelming. Conventional navigation requires a high degree of attention and distracts you from strolling around undisturbed and be immersed in the art, tech or whatever you came for.

Stroll is a passive navigation system for your phone that provides unobtrusive indoor navigation for exhibition spaces and encourages exploration and discovery. A simple vibration will notify you when you’re about to miss something relevant to you.

[vimeo 133278347]

Using stroll

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When you start the App, you’re presented with exhibitions nearby. You can view exhibits sorted by popularity among other users of the app and mark the ones you care about for later.

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Arrived at the exhibition, you set up your queue. You see all your previously saved items and how much time it’ll take you to watch them all. If you got more time, you can have stroll add suggestions to your queue, based on exhibits related to your marked items. These suggestions are generated by semantically connecting exhibits which are liked by the same person, similar to the way amazon serves you product suggestions.

This is meant to further encourage exploration.

As you start exploring, the app becomes your silent companion. Just leave it in your pocket. No need to look at it or interact with it in any way.

While you’re walking around the exhibition, stroll will vibrate in a particular pattern when you’re about to miss something, so that you can stop and turn around.

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There’s no need to pull out your phone and get distracted but if you do, stroll tells you what you missed and provides simple directions to guide you.

How does this all work?

The system relies on bluetooth beacons for indoor positioning and is extremely easy to set up.

As the organizer of an exhibition, all you need to do, is to position our beacons around the rooms, roughly one beacon every 3 exhibits.

You then walk through the exhibition and mark every single booth, painting or other location of interest by walking around it, taking a picture of it and providing a name.

The app remembers the item’s location in relation to the beacons around it. There’s no need to provide any floor plans and there’s no requirement to distribute the beacons in any strict patterns.

Later on, you can clean up the data you provided, add more photos and a description and finally publish your exhibition to stroll.