This prototype was an intermediate result of a robot-human interaction project conducted at Torooc Inc., a VC-funded start-up company where I was a co-founder and Director of Software Development, in 2011. We started up this company through winning the first-place prize at the 2012 Start-up Competition by Seoul National University R&DB Foundation and Seoul Techno Holdings.
This research project had been conducted for my master's thesis (Master of Information Management degree). I conceptualized cultual background with Hall's high- and low-context culture (1976) and tried to see whether people's perceptions of urban places vary between physical addresses and symbolic representations of spaces (landmarks), when their cultural backgrounds were different. A survey questionnaire was used to measure cultural background, and a web-based online game was used to measure people's perceptions of places.
Geo-local systems can significantly increase users' familiarity with new places. However, for these systems to be useful, geospatial information needs to be presented in ways that those systems can minimize users' difficulties of learning about a new place. This raises a fundamental question about what kinds and representations of geospatial information are effective in making a place more familiar, so that people can adjust to the place more easily even before visiting the unfamiliar world.