Most state and regional tourism promotion and marketing efforts focus on a few major attractions and well-traveled areas. As a result, most travelers follow the major highways and often miss unique and interesting communities and sites located in more remote areas. Digital documentation of these areas of history, culture, environment and other features in conjunction with rapidly advancing handheld and wireless technology allow rural areas to enhance visitors experience and enable rural communities to more effectively promote and market their community. The purpose of this project is to build and test tools and processes to document, list and organize historic, cultural, environmental and other unique sites in rural areas into a digital format that can be accessed by travelers via the Internet, displayed via handheld technology, and potentially in real-time via cell phone technology to enhance their experiences. The Phase I project will develop and test a prototype Internet based trip planning program and handheld electronic rural tour guide. OBJECTIVES: The Phase I technical objective is to develop and evaluate a prototype software tool and process that will enable rural communities to gather GPS, digital cultural, historic, environmental and other unique data that will be utilized by travelers via PC and handheld technology to access the information to more effectively plan back road trips and enhance the experience through multimedia, and potentially in real-time via cell phone technology. The Phase I project will develop and test a prototype Internet based trip planning program and handheld electronic rural tour guide and evaluate development of the program in Phase II for operation on a handheld and or cell phone platform. APPROACH: The research team will gather data on travelers' desired features for a handheld tour guide to deliver the digitized data from the rural communities. Data gathered will include the type of information travelers are most interested, how would they use the data (trip planning, enhancing their visit, education, etc), the format that they would like to receive the data, and how much they would be willing to pay for the enhanced experience. The research team will interview 100 individuals at tourism visitor centers in South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska and also interview 50 visitors to the National Music Museum in Vermillion, South Dakota. The data will be compiled and used to design the website, the data collection tools and the handheld rural tourist visitor guide. The primary development task will be to identify the materials that will be loaded onto the handheld for the community. One possible method would be to allow the traveler to download by subject or topic such as history, culture, environment and others. The primary technical challenge will be management of the potentially large data files. Since each of the local communities is unique and different, organizations involved in the gathering of data for the model will need to be flexible, yet produce consistent types and quality of data. States Pride will target specific groups such as historical societies, students, and chambers of commerce to test the data collection tools and evaluate the effectiveness and data accuracy of each group. In addition to the local data collection, local students and participating university students will identify other unique and related interesting information on the region using a variety of databases and sources such as the South Dakota Oral History Center. States Pride personnel will work with the local participants to ensure the accuracy and quality of data collected and presented. The handheld tour guide prototype will be tested technically first by having research team members utilize the prototype to tour the county and Vermillion sites. The primary emphasis of this test will be to ensure that the prototypes work and effectively retrieve and deliver the desired information to the user. The research team will then conduct the test of the prototype system with visitors. Ten volunteers from Sioux Falls and Sioux City, two larger cities approximately 1 hour from Vermillion will be recruited to use the Internet site to plan their day trip to Vermillion and Clay county and then use the handheld guide during their visit to Vermillion. At the conclusion of the volunteers' tour they will complete a survey and participate in an interview. States Pride will evaluate the feasibility of utilizing cell phones to allow travelers to download the rural tour guide program for a community while traveling. In addition to the technical issues, the interviews with tourists will also gather data on consumer interest in the cell phone platform and desired features
