Mobile phones are an integral part of our lives, and nowadays they are used not only for phone calls but also for displaying various kinds of multimedia content: hypertexts, photos, movies, sounds, games are commonly present on mobile devices. In addition to these elements mobile phones offer extreme portability and consequently they represent ideal systems to accompany visitors during a field visit in a Geopark. For these reasons, mobile phones present amazing potentialities for divulgation of geology and they are an excellent platform to host a version of TERRAGAZE, a geological multimedia system originally developed for PC.
Notwithstanding these elements, the development of multimedia content for mobile phones has to face compatibility issues: there are plentiful models of mobiles and there is a vast choice of file formats. How to design a Geopark multimedia guide working on all the visitors’ mobiles?
Nowadays, the mobile market is aiming to an equal fruition of Web contents, using either computer of mobile. For these reasons, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recently promoted the MWBP (Mobile Web Best Practices) which states the standards for ideating, designing, publishing a mobile web site. Consequently, the MWBP constitute an ideal standard to design a hypertext guide of a Geopark for mobile phones. With these specifications in mind, it has been developed TERRAGAZE MOBILE, a multimedia system for mobile phones characterized by the following strong points:
