Where’s everybody? Comparing the use of heatmaps to uncover cities’ tacit social context in smartphones and pervasive displays

Abstract

We introduce HotCity, a city-wide social context crowdsourcing platform that utilises user’s current location and geo-tagged social data (e.g., check-ins, “likes” and ratings) to autonomously obtain insight on a city’s tacit social awareness (e.g., “when is best time and where to go out on a Saturday night?”). HotCity is available as a mobile application for Android and as an interactive application on pervasive large displays, showcasing a heatmap of social buzz. We present the results of an in-the-field evaluation with 30 volunteers, of which 27 are tourists of the mobile app, compare it to a previous evaluation of the pervasive display app and also present usage data of free use of the pe..