I’ve recently returned from two weeks in China as part of the Student Leadership in International Cooperation project. While most of the trip was spent visiting university campuses, we did manage to fit in some sightseeing. On our first day in Beijing we had a couple of free hours in the afternoon, so we headed to the Forbidden City (otherwise known as the Palace Museum).
It’s a huge site and we were on a tight timeframe – we just managed to buy tickets before the box office closed at 4pm, giving us an hour to make our way through before the site closed at 5pm. We hired the location-aware audioguides that are available in multiple languages:
The audioguide was small and light, with minimal controls – basically just volume adjustment and a pause function:
The introductory track starts pretty much as soon as they give you the guide – which means I missed it the first time around while I fiddled with the earpiece so that it didn’t keep falling off (an issue exacerbated by the filter mask I was wearing due to the high pollution levels in Beijing that day). I accidentally changed the language by pressing “option”, but was able to scroll through until I was back at English. “Help” restarted the introductory track and then I was back in business.
Overall it worked fairly well and it was useful to have the guide double as a mini-map. However it does not lend itself well to the “walk and look” approach you tend to take when you’re trying to get through a site quickly (like we were). It meant that sometimes the audio description cut out mid-way through because I had moved out of range. There also didn’t seem to be a way of restarting a description if you wanted to. But the location awareness of the device meant that it was pretty much set-and-forget, which is probably a reasonable tradeoff of control for simplicity.
As far as I can tell from the Lightour website (using Google translate as I coudn’t see an English version), it seems that this technology is being used in several tourist sites in China, but apparently nowhere else as yet.
Has anyone seen or used anything similar?
yes, they use the same device for the summer Palace in Beijing!