Enjoying your Vacation? Wish you recorded it all in detail?
Are you reading this blog somewhere away from home? Going away soon or is your vacation already over?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could recollect this splendid time through rich multimedia experiences, re-walk that track during your explorations in that small village you loved so much?
I have been using AIRS and Storica as a travel diary to have answers to these questions. It’s been a great experience to relive my travels at any time, right on my mobile! Tracks are visualised through fly-over maps with each trackpoint showing an individual context panels after being clicked on. These panels show you more information on light, noise level, people around, programs used on your mobile and much more. The use of Google Maps guarantees that the maps are detailed and accurate.
What I enjoy most, though, are the digital stories of my travels; stories told by Storica through teasing out meaningful events from my recordings, these events around social comms, pictures taken or the annotations I added through AIRS (including my mood when I saw that amazing painting in a museum). I can personalise these stories by choosing location-dependent backgrounds (which I usually associate with my own snapshots from the places I’ve been to). Small maps, again, show you where the event occurred and I can filter events chosen in order to focus certain days.
Wish you had used AIRS and Storica for yourself? Wait, it gets better!
TecVis, the company behind AIRS and Storica, have announced their Kickstarter project, which extends the mobile solution towards the desktop. This effectively extends your personal diary towards that family diary you have been looking for! Not only can you include recordings from your desktop directly, e.g., on application usage, web usage etc, but you can also enjoy your digital stories and detailed maps on the bigger screen. All this is based on the WordPress blogging platform so that you can extend your recordings with own annotations as blogs while being able to personalise the blog to your liking (e.g., putting that great picture from your last trip as a background).
As a person who is very concerned with my own data, the policy that “Your data is Yours” is really appealing to me. The mobile recording platform AIRS only stores recordings locally on your device. Any transfer off is done by myself to my own devices – nothing is stored in the cloud just to use it. The desktop version, to be done through the Kickstarter project, also stores data only locally on your device with the software only processing and visualising locally. The subscription for the desktop version only covers the ability to add new data at any point; when stopping the subscription all data remains my own! That is a significant departure from the many web-based tracking tools out there!
Is Storica the right thing for you? If you have ever looked for an answer to the questions at the beginning of this post, then Storica is your answer! To make it happen, the Kickstarter projects needs backing though, so head over and pledge!