http://www.hants.gov.uk/hcc
Hampshire County Council (HCC) provides essential services for 1.2 million people across Hampshire. Some 30,000 staff deliver a wide range of services, including education, social services, trading standards, libraries, highways and transportation, museums, country parks and opportunities for recreation. The County Council is the Highway Authority for Hampshire and is responsible for the promotion, construction maintenance and strategic planning of all roads in the County apart from the motorway and trunk road network which is the responsibility of the Highways Agency of the DETR. The County Council also has a role to co-ordinate all forms of public transport within Hampshire.
Hampshire is considered as a "Centre of Excellence" for work undertaken in the field of transport planning. The HCC has helped to shape transport policy development at the local, regional, national and European levels through a wide range of measures spanning the whole spectrum of transport provision. This has lead to the development of fully integrated transport strategies for Hampshire, which embrace all modes of transport and involve a host of stakeholders including the business community, transport operators, the public and all tiers of local government.
Hampshire is at the forefront of intelligent transport systems as a means of managing the demand for road transport, and ITS forms a core element of the integrated transport policies that have been adopted. HCC has participated in the DRIVE2, Fourth and Fifth Framework research and development programmes of the European Commission. In the nine years of ROMANSE, the project has progressed from a research and development concept to a fully operational traffic and travel information centre. It is an intrinsic part of the management and operation of the transport network, providing a model test site for the development, application, and monitoring and evaluation of intelligent transport systems. Through the use of ITS within ROMANSE, Hampshire is utilising information technology to influence travel behaviour, to make more efficient use of available resources and through projects such as PEPTRAN encourage the use of public transport and create a better cleaner environment in which to live and work.
The County Council has developed the Winchester Movement and Access Plan (WMAP), which has changed very little since its conception ten years ago. Its key aim is to make Winchester a pleasant place in which to live and work and to visit, a place where people matter and have priority. Amongst its more detailed aims are to seek to reduce the impact of traffics on the environment, reduce air pollution, noise and vibration and reduce the visual intrusion of traffic.
In CIVITAS the County Council is providing the lead demonstration site of Winchester as part of the MIRACLES project. HCC have political commitment to drive forward the transport policy and technology measures proposed in as part of the project.
Tourism is one of Hampshire’s principal generators of wealth and employment – annually bringing in around 35 million visitors to the county, generating some 1500 million Euros for the Region each year and supporting some 43,000 jobs (6.6% of the county’s employment). The HCC has strategic responsibility for promoting Hampshire to tourists and visitors, and plays a key operational role in developing, marketing and managing cross-county tourism and cultural activities in close liaison with the tourism industry and the 11 Hampshire district councils and the two unitary City Councils of Portsmouth and Southampton. The County’s Tourism Strategy specifically identifies key actions to develop new interactive IST tools to radically improve marketing information and relational marketing; and to deliver innovative added value on-line services for tourists. This assures the political support for the project.
HCC has a proven track record of success in managing and delivering results in Information Society projects for tourism at regional, national and European levels. For example, its work in the TourISt Project (ERDF Article 10 IS) to develop a integrated back office and front office information services for tourism SMEs and tourism professionals has resulted in a fully operational online tourism marketing and management system, branded as the “VISIT” service, which is currently in operation in 62 destinations in Southern and South East England. The system, delivered through a partnership between HCC, the Regional Tourist Board and the South East England Regional Development Agency, is fully self financed through sales of licences, and generates operating surpluses that are reinvested into the continued development and exploitation of the system. In addition, Hampshire is leading work on a National Pathfinder Project to demonstrate interoperability between VISIT, other online tourism systems and the EnglandNet tourism marketing infrastructure to enable tourists to access seamless data via many distribution channels.
Andy Wren. Born in Banbury (United Kingdom) in 1959, he is a project manager working in the Intelligent Transport Systems Group in the Environment Department of Hampshire County Council. He was educated at St. Peters School, Southbourne, Dorset and Southampton College of Higher Education. He joined Hampshire County Council in 1979 and has held various posts in the Environment Department, specialising in the areas of traffic and transportation. He has over ten years experience of managing the County Council’s interests in United Kingdom and European research and development projects such as: SCOPE/ROMANSE - a large ITS demonstration project, PEPTRAN - pedestrian and public transport navigation using PDAs and since 2002 the MIRACLES project, implementing a wide variety of transport policy and technology measures as part of the EU’s CIVITAS initiative.
Sue Faulkner, VISIT Tourism Services Director (Member of Institute of Management; Institute of Management Services; Institute of Training & Organisation Development, Member of the Tourism Management Institute).
Sue Faulkner is the Marketing and Business Director for the VISIT eTourism Service on behalf of Hampshire County Council, working in partnership with the Southern and South East England Regional Tourist Board and the South East England Regional Development Agency. Currently, around 60 destinations in Southern and South East England subscribe to the shared VISIT database and interactive services, helping local authorities and over 8,000 tourism SMEs to provide better quality tourism information to tourists and local communities, and to improve marketing, management and sales of tourism products and services. By the end of 2003/04, VISIT will be supporting some 12,000 tourism SMEs to market and sell their products through a variety of distribution channels.
In addition, Sue Faulkner manages on behalf of Hampshire County Council regional and European IST projects, particularly in the fields of Intelligent Tourism Marketing & Management Systems, E-Business and Citizens’ Information Services. Her achievements in this field include the successful delivery of results from the EU Funded TourISt Project (ERDF), INFOVILLE (FWP4), as well as other major IST projects.
Sue is a member of the Hampshire Economic Partnership Tourism Group. She is also a member of the UK National Tourism Technology Working Group, and is on the EnglandNet Project Board, working closely with the English Tourism Council and the British Tourist Authority. Sue is a member of the Management Board of the EU TeleRegions Network. Sue Faulkner has a long track record in Marketing and Business Development and managing major multi-disciplinary projects in both the private and public sectors.
Role:
HCC is an end user for iTacitus and will play a major part in the acquisition of tourism information. They will also lead the Requirements and Specification phase of the project.
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IGD submitted a paper to the VAST2008 conference in Braga, Portugal in December ( http://www.vast2008.org ).The paper has been accepted.
The paper title is "Reality Filtering: A Visual Time Machine in Augmented Reality". Here is an abstract of the paper:
We present Reality Filtering, an application that makes it possible to visualize original content like drawings or paintings of buildings and frescos seamlessly superimposed on reality by using filtered augmented reality. This enables simple and inexpensive applications in the cultural heritage and architecture area.
The main idea is that the video stream showing the reality is filtered on the fly to acquire the same presentation style as the virtual objects.
This allows for a better integration of original historic content and creates the impression of a virtual time journey.
The registration of the virtual objects in the video images is provided by a robust 6DOF tracking framework based on two technologies that work in tandem: an initialization step based on Randomized Trees and a frame-to-frame tracking phase based on KLT. For the initialization, we present the novel concept of temporally distributed computational load (TDCL), which is able to automatically detect and register multiple objects while maintaining a constant video frame rate of 20 frames / sec.
For mid- to long-range augmentation a pure 2-dimensional tracking with 3DOF is applicable and leads to significant performance gain. The entire application runs in real time on Ultra Mobile PCs. |
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A paper related to the iTACITUS project has been presented by Michael Zoellner during the Stockholm eChallenges conference 23rd of October 2008. The title of the paper is "Encouraging Cultural Exploration: a Dynamic Tour Guide based on Personalised Contextual Information and Ad-hoc Planning" and the authors are: Jonah DEARLOVE, Maurizio MEGLIOLA, Silvana TOFFOLO, Michael ZOELLNER.
Download the paper
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Fraunhofer IGD showed an iTACITUS-based application in cooperation with Rome Reborn at SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles. The mobile application overlayed 3D models of roman monuments on floor-maps and posters at the booth in real time.  
See a video of the installation at Youtube!
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TXT presented a paper about the Progress Module used in iTacitus at the “EVA 2008" conference in Wien, Austria on Tuesday , 26 August 2008. The title of the paper is "Integrating Agent and Wireless Technologies for Location-based Services in Cultural Heritage", authors are Maurizio Megliola and Luca Barbieri. Download the paper
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We will be presenting iTacitus at “The Agenda for a sustainable and competitive European tourism” and centralised EU financial instruments supporting tourism in Portorož, Slovenia on Tuesday, 10 June 2008. |
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