The Ghost of Peter Stuyvesant Audio Tour...

This tour was an interesting example of an interaction. I enjoyed certain aspects of this walking tour. The concept behind this interaction is that you are on a audio tour of Peter Stuyvesant's farm that once stood in the lower East side portion of the Manhattan Island. While you walk around the area that was once the farm, you are supposed to call the telephone number given, and enter the corresponding extension for the area that you are located. To my understanding, this is supposed to give you a sense of the 17th century Manhattan experience. First of all, I did enjoy the idea of the interaction. I liked walking around modern day Manhattan, and experiencing the history of the location via audio clips. While this interaction intrigues me, the way that this tour was structured lacks in its depth. I feel like the audio clips almost do not have enough significance, and their quality is relatively poor as well. I would rather the audio clips to be more conventional in a sense, similar to a walking tour of a museum. If there was an ambient background sound of the 17th century farm contrasted with a historical statement regarding your current location, I think it would have been much more successful. Another downfall of this tour was the fact that there was only 1 telephone number. Did the designers of this interaction consider the fact that many people would be calling this number at the same time, thus clogging up the telephone lines? I don't think they did. To solve this problem there could be a different telephone number posted at each location. This would encourage people to hunt down the next telephone number in a scavenger hunt type interaction. This would add more excitement to the tour, and also make the technology aspect of it much more functional. I feel like the ideas behind this interaction are interesting, but the execution of the ideas were not as successful.