Your mobile phone soon could be your source for on-site tours of some of the nation's most popular tourist destinations, thanks to Oregon Public Broadcasting, History Detectives and a group of technology and business partners. Together, they just launched a mobile content prototype, dubbed "Road Trip," using Fort Vancouver as the first historic site to get the mobile Road Trip treatment.
OPB hopes the prototype will be the first in a national rollout of interactive, mobile tours developed and hosted by the History Detectives from the popular PBS series.
The tour, available as a stand-alone mobile application for download on your cell phone, includes an interactive map of Fort Vancouver, along with a series of short videos about the historic trade center in its heyday. History Detective Wes Cowan walks mobile users through the fort's architecture, furnishings and frontier-era medical facility. The mobile tour has an interactive feature that lets users quiz themselves and their family as they walk around the grounds of the fort.
"Right now the application is available for download only on Sprint's Samsung A900 phones, but we hope to expand the application to other phones in the future. This is a great example of OPB making its content available over a multitude of platforms, so you can watch us anytime, anyplace," said Marion Rice, executive producer of the project.
"The History Detectives Road Trip is a unique mobile application accessible through an easy access icon residing on the phone at a desired location, enabling fans of the series to access extra content on their mobile phone and interact with the series beyond the confines of their living room anytime they want. For the first time, our viewers have a permanent and a very visible access to an appealing application that extends the original program," said Rice.
Under the auspices of the American Film Institute's Digital Content Lab, OPB partnered with Rentrak, Lion TV, Big Spaceship (a Los Angeles design firm) and NPTV (an interactive development firm in Paris) to use their BANDO technology that enabled a rapid development for this unique mobile application. The Road Trip is being distributed by Sprint on their Samsung A900 phones with PowerVision enabled. Use the Search function to find "HD Road Trip." Download the Road Trip locally to your phone.
History Detectives airs on the stations of Oregon Public Broadcasting Television Mondays at 9pm.
