Why?

The saturation of camera equipped mobile phones in the consumer market in recent years has led to new possibilities in on-the-spot photography and video capture. The majority of mobile phones now come equiped with at least a basic camera, with many models boasting resolutions in excess of two megapixels. With this built in capability, cameraphone holders can by themselves become on-the-spot photographers and documentarians, snapping pictures and recording video on the fly, where ever they are.

What?

Around Ireland is a mobile documentary project completed as part of the MSc in Multmedia Systems at Trinity College Dublin. We have travelled the 32 counties of Ireland, gathering video and images on mobile phones over the course of the Summer of 2006. The mobile content is sent directly to our site, Aroundireland.net from camera-equipped mobile phones in real time.

Rather than sending an image to just one other individual via MMS, Around Ireland aims to act as a central respository for mobile photographic content, allowing visitors to browse submitted mobile pictures from all over the island, geotagged according to location.

How?

  • Combination of Nokia/Sony Ericsson phones and MMS
  • Movable Type blogging software

We used the following to augment and enhance Movable Type to enable moblogging and geotagging:

  • PHP
  • Perl
  • Javascript
  • Valid XHTML and CSS
  • Google Maps API


On the video side, some of the video has been sent unedited directly from the phone, while others has been edited before uploading, incorporating titles and music.

  • Google Video for storage
  • Adobe Premiere Elements 2 for video editing

Thanks to: SixApart, Vodafone.ie MMS, PACE Language Institute and KRC.

© Around Ireland 2006

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