Tsukuba’s tourism problem is one of legibility rather than of attractions. Signage, timetables and facility notices were built for domestic visitors, so a foreign visitor arriving at Tsukuba Centre had limited ways to find out whether the Mount Tsukuba access road was congested, which bus to take, or what a given notice said. Published tourism material describes what exists; it does not describe conditions right now.
HukuRepo is an Android application that delivers real-time tourism, traffic and environmental information to visitors in Tsukuba, developed by the University of Tsukuba’s Center for Computational Sciences on top of the BigClouT data analysis platform. It draws on municipal open data, sensor feeds and submissions from other users, and presents the result in English.
The application was paired with digital signage at the Tsukuba Centre transport hub, so the same real-time picture reached visitors who had installed nothing. Later trial phases added sensor-collected weather and congestion data to the feed.
– Real-time tourism, traffic and environmental information on an Android handset
– English-language delivery for international visitors
– Draws on municipal open data, sensor feeds and user submissions through the BigClouT platform
– Paired digital signage at the Tsukuba Centre transport hub
– Carries the visitor problem-reporting channel within the same application
Trialled in Tsukuba, Japan under the EU–Japan BigClouT project. The public trial ran from 1 to 30 November 2017 in the Tsukuba Station area and around Mount Tsukuba, in English, with user information anonymised and the collected data used only for the research. The application does not appear to be publicly available today.
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