What happens when you can access all the world’s media, but the access is constrained by screen size, bandwidth, attention, and battery life? We present a novel mobile contextaware software prototype that enables access to images on the go. Our prototype utilizes the channel metaphor to give users contextual access to media of interest according to key dimensions: spatial, social, and topical. Our experimental prototype attempts to be playful and simple to use, yet provide powerful and comprehensive media access. A temporally-driven sorting scheme for media items allows quick and easy access to items of interest in any dimension. For ad-hoc tasks, we extend the application with keyword search to deliver the long tail of media and images. Elements of social interaction and communication around the photographs are built into the mobile application, to increase user engagement. The application utilizes Flickr.com as an image and social-network data source, but could easily be extended to support other websites and media formats.

We designed and iterated on a photo browsing application for high-end mobile phones. The application, Zurfer, supports viewing of photos from the user, their contacts, and the general user population. Photos are organized using a channel metaphor, driven by multiple dimensions: social, spatial and topical. Zurfer was deployed to over 500 users; extensive user research was conducted with nine participants. The data from the deployment and the study exposes general themes of mobile application use, as well as requirements for mobile applications in the photos domain, mobile social applications, and entertainmentdriven mobile applications.

In this article we present an application to navigate through a photo collection, using context. In this application, the user context is represented by the photos that are close to him according to one or several dimensions. For example, the user’s context can be represented by the photos that were taken near him during a precise period like the Second World War. Such a context permits the user to move in the photo collection just by walking and to get photos of the surroundings that were taken during another time period. This application offers other services, such as temporal navigation to get different views of the current place, route planning or virtually entering into closed buildings.