Digital urban ambience: Mediating context on mobile devices in a city

We explore the term digital urban ambience to describe the user experience of mobile devices mediating context in metropolitan areas. Mediated context-awareness explores a constructivist approach to context and aims to provide resources for experiencing context rather than correctly recognizing and adapting to it. Exploring this approach we have built a prototype system, eSpective₂, combining maps and augmented reality on a touch phone, and we have studied its use. We conducted a triangulated field study involving 58 participants and up to one month of use. Elaborating on the work of Thibaud (2002)  [1], the main finding is that context resources provided through mobile devices digitally contribute to the experience or feeling of urban ambience (1) by adding to the quality of the situation as a whole, (2) as a catalyst for action, and (3) as a sensory background.