INTERACTIVE VIDEOS AS GEOSPATIAL INTERFACES: A CASE STUDY FOR REGIONAL PROMOTION

Abstract. In this paper we discuss the potential of interactive video as an interface to geospatial information, and demonstrate our findings in a case study driven by goals of promoting a region for tourism and for preventing brain drain. Use of video is controversial due to various technical and human-centric debates; on the one hand, they offer unique qualitative insights as they enable a certain level of immersion via walk-throughs and fly-throughs and they are considered attractive by viewers, on the other hand, they are complex because they contain unfiltered (possibly too much) information that may be irrelevant to the goals of the users, and require careful consideration from computational and bandwidth concerns. We examine these arguments from the literature briefly, and demonstrate our case study in which we have embedded and overlain statistical and other local information interactively over drone footage, and measured levels of usability and user engagement using standardized scales. Our implementation and design choices are detailed in the article. Our small user experiment (n = 6) suggests high levels of usability, desirability and engagement by our participants, leading to the hypothesis that video is an attractive medium and indeed has strong potential for regional promotion, given that the computational and cognitive issues are taken into account.