An authoring tool for urban audio tours with animated maps

Podcasts are getting popular as a new type of radio or television for mobile media players. The Podcasts are often free. Anyone can also easily publicize Podcasts like Blog on the Internet. People can choose and listen to their intended Podcasts at anytime and at any place without using any mobile telecommunication services. PodWalk is a new kind of Podcast which has been designed for guiding real spaces such as towns and museums while walking. One of the disadvantages of PodWalks is its difficulty for listeners in synchronizing their locations with narrators' ones. Listeners often get lost and cannot synchronize with narrators' locations. To solve the problem of listeners' losing their ways in PodWalks, we propose a new framework maPodWalks as an extension of PodWalks to provide egocentric mappings synchronized with narrations on mobile media players. We have developed a new authoring tool for user-generated maPodWalks.