Finding DeTour
I’ve misplaced a reference. Do you know it?
- The paper I have in mind was, I think, published in the mid-90s in a conference proceedings — probably CHI, possibly AAAI or IJCAI.
- It proposed a variety of hypothetical systems that represented interesting alternative systems.
- One application, DeTour, was a portable tour guide, but instead of showing you the best way to get from Charing Cross to the Tate, it would take you places you didn’t want to see, but ought to see.
- One way it found places of interest was looking at local internet traffic anomalies, since these might signal flash crowds or raves.
- The paper was a collaboration between the Royal College of Art and Hewlett Packard.
Does this ring a bell?
(March 7: Found it! Gaver, Bill and Martin , Heather (2000), ‘Alternatives: Exploring Information Appliances through Conceptual Design Proposals’, CHI 2000, 209-16. Passing this post to Chat-GPT turned out to be the key step, not because ChatGPT found the paper — it invented a plausible paper that it claimed was to be found in CHI ’96, but did not exist — but because one of the authors ChatGPT suggested seemed plausible.)