At the HP gaming summit last month [1,2] I hinted at the fact that Mediascapes had something in the works for May. I'm at the HP Mobility Summit in Shanghai and we just made the announcement. HP is creating a community web site for Mediascapes users and creators and we just opened up the beta release at www.mscapers.com!

Full disclosure: I manage the team and I love their work!

Mediascapes: A new medium

A Mediascape is a context-aware multimedia experience that allows you to trigger multimedia content based on your context such as location [3]. A key concept of Mediascapes is linking media to context, and we view this combination as a new medium. For example, there are images (pictures), audio (sound), video (time-sequenced pictures), and mediascapes (context-triggered multimedia). Mediascapes can be used to create games, educational tools, historical tours, and many other applications.

We'd like to get this new medium into widespread use and do it in as open a way as possible. Since we're trying to create a new medium, we figured that it deserves a community. So, we created the mscape web site as a place where people can go to create, share, and play Mediascapes and discuss their experiences.

Downloadable software

The Mscapers site has mscape software available for download, including:

• Mscape toolkit (PC software): A Mediascape creation and management toolkit for use on your PC.
• Mscape player (client software): A Mediascape player for use on your GPS-enabled mobile device running Windows Mobile 5.0 or newer.

Mscaper web site

The Mscapers site allows Mediascape creators to create and upload mediascapes and it allows Mediascape users to download and experience Mediascapes. 

It also has Mscape wizards that let you create Mediascapes on the web site.

The Mscapers site also has discussion boards and a wiki that allows developers to discuss their experiences with the toolkit. It also has rating tools that allow users to rate and discuss the Mediascapes on the site.

Measures of success

The Mediascapes project is an HP Labs research project that has been underway for a few years. It is now a project in the HP Innovation Program Office [4], where we are looking for opportunities for productization.

Full disclosure: Our measure of success is the number of Mscapers. This includes both the number of people who download and play Mediascapes and the number of people who create and upload Mediascapes. So, we'd like to get as many Mscapers as possible!

Try it out!

Give it a try and let us know what you think! Please tell your friends about it, too!

What do you think of Mediascapes as a new medium?
Do you have suggestions on how we can establish Mediascapes as a new medium?
Do you have suggestions on how we can grow the number of Mscapers?

Tags: mediascape, mscaper, mscape, mediascapes, mscapers, mscapes, context-aware multimedia,a new medium, gaming, HP Labs, VooDoo, HP

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