Tracklines

Tracklines was a walk with stories in it. Hikers on the Hoodoo Trail in Banff National Park carried a Nokia N70 phone and a Bluetooth GPS unit on a velcro armband, and the trail was seeded with story points. Our 2007 treatment called it a "walkumentary": closer to a museum audio tour or a sound walk than a game. It also put the whole interaction in one image: the trail flooded with "a responsive musical fluid of different densities trapped inside the shapes of mapped polygons". You find a story by hearing it get warmer. One trail could carry several walks at once, stacked "like invisible stratigraphy" and picked from a Layer Selector; the first, Geology: A Walk Through Time, was co-authored with Parks Canada.

Each story point is a set of nested rings. Walk into the outer ring and an ambient sound and a drawing start on the phone; closer in, both build. At the centre a short "hook" sound plays and the screen resolves into a menu: Play Story or Move On. Move On asks once more; after the story, Play Again or Move On. Walk away past the reset zone and the point re-arms. The phone could stay clipped to your belt the whole time: the screen was there for people who wanted it. These are the Limestone point's screens, in order, from the schematic.

I built a version of the walk for this page, a map you could drag a hiker across, and took it out. Tracklines was designed as an added layer over surroundings that were already majestic: the Hoodoos, the Bow River, Tunnel Mountain above you, the sound arriving while you walked. The phone was never meant to be the point. Recreating that in a web page is somewhat futile, so this page shows the work that went into it instead: the screens, the animations, the documents.

The Limestone story as the phone played it when you chose Play Story: the drawing grows in, then the narration.

I was the interaction designer. I designed how the phone behaves around a story point: the rings, the menus and their second chances, the fail-safes for a hiker who walks off in the middle of a story, and the controls. I made all the graphics and animation for the geology walk, and the Tracklines poster and logo art. And I drew the technical schematic and flowcharts the engineer built from: every screen, every asset name, every state.

A navigation clue, tested as a motion study in June 2006 (by the file dates). Far from a story point the rings look random: loose, broken, out of register. The closer you get, the more concentric they become, until they lock into one target at the hotspot: an abstract, game-like compass. The test carries on past that point, the target tilting back, stacking into layers and falling through the centre. The walk we shipped used growing drawings on the screen instead, but nested rings stayed the model for every story point.

Eight frames from the same test, at the phone's screen size: random when you're far away, more concentric as you close in, locked into a target at the hotspot; then the target tilts back, stacks and falls through.

Pick the geology walk and the phone plays its intro first: what the walk is about and how to wear the kit. The treatment calls it "essentially a pre-hike tutorial". The animation is mine; the sound is Davide Di Saro's with Geoffrey Shea, and the narration is by Emily Paige, Davide Di Saro and Angus Leech.

Each story point had its own drawing, labelled like a plate in a field guide, and I animated each one drawing itself: the line work builds, then the detail arrives. The treatment notes that video at each hotspot "exceeded the memory capacity of the mobile phones", so on the phone the rings show stills: stages of these drawings growing in.

The Water drawing across five working days, from the dated files: December 18, 19, 20 and 21, then January 7, when the clouds got their colour.

Fourteen pages, March 2007. The file directory, the phone controls, the Layer Selector, the hotspot locations with their GPS coordinates, both flowcharts, the media key, and a screen-by-screen spec of every asset, ending with the boundaries. Open a page and use the arrow keys to read through.

We tested it on the trail with volunteer hikers, using participant observation and other ethnographic methods with Concordia's EMU group and OCAD. The rings worked, but hikers almost never left the path to chase a sound. Story points placed off the trail, or only brushing it with their outer rings, were "almost universally overlooked": people heard the clues build and fade and kept walking. So the points went onto the path itself, into "bottlenecks" where they "can't be missed". The treatment called that section "Loaded Breadcrumbs".