Blauzahn™

Augmented Storytelling

The Blauzahn app will take you through a special kind of audio story. The stories we tell, have a relation to the environment in which they play: interiors, neighbourhoods, parks, buildings, streets, landscapes...

The Blauzahn™ App guides through stories and walks without requiring users to look at the screen.

Listen to the right thing in the right place at the right time

Blauzahn™ needs three components:

Content

There is an atmosphere of a place, or a special mood in a room. What the audience sees, is combined with descriptions, sounds, or music to create an audio-visual experience.

You have ideas for a story, a piece of music, sounds, descriptions or information that should be heard in a particular place? We will support you with the process of the design for a Blauzahn™-experience.

Installation

Requirements for a Blauzahn™-experience are iBeacons, GPS coordinates for outdoors, audio recordings and a connection to our Blauzahn™ server.

We build each individual Blauzahn™-experience together with the organizer. Since everything is controlled by our server, corrections and adjustments can be recorded and optimized cost-effectively with a specially developed authoring tool. Even during a test.

App

Blauzahn™-app makes expensive and high-maintenance special equipment unnecessary. It is free available on the App Store.

Minimum requirements: iPhone 4s / iOS 7, or Android 4.3 with Bluetooth LE.

The app can be customized to match the corporate design of an organizer. Paid content is supported by in-app purchases.

Blauzahn Stories

Some examples for stories you can participate in.

1. Sans-Papiers

Flyer

Experience the tour

 

Monday to Thursday 10am to 5pm

Sans-Papiers Anlaufstelle Zürich SPAZ | Kalkbreitestrasse 8, 1. Stock | 8003 Zürich | Tel. 043 960 87 77

 

Awareness and information

"Ein Leben im Schatten" - "A life in the shadow" is an awareness project for SPAZ. People without an official residence permit are commonly referred to as «Sans-Papiers». SPAZ is a place to go for them, if they have questions about their legal situation.

Blauzahn™ was a good choice, especially for a project that needed to make a complex and multi-faceted context understandable to a broad audience.

The combination of impressions and information makes it possible to provides facts and figures as well as to get an audience into the situation of people without regular residence permit in Switzerland.

The tour leads through the building of the Kalkbreite Cooperative in Zurich and takes about an hour. It was realized with the support of the Kalkbreite Cooperative and had opened on 12.09.2015.

Article in Tages-Anzeiger from 14.09.2015 Der Blick auf die Unsichtbaren.

Article about Sans-Papiers with reference to the Blauzahn-Tour NZZ-Online vom 7.1.2016.

 

2. Discover the old town of Zürich

Guided tour at your own pace

Without ever having to look at the screen, the Blauzahn™ tour guides visitors through Zurich's old and inner city. You can linger when and where you want and again be guided to the next place of interest.

The tour starts in the big hall of the main station and takes about two to three hours.

Currently available in German only.

And what does Blauzahn™ and iBeacon mean?

Blauzahn is an allusion to Bluetooth, a wireless technology standard which allows completely new applications for exchanging data over short distances at very lo energy.

Small Bluetooth transmitters, so-called iBeacons can be placed at any objects to send out a pattern, which can be received by smartphones. The smartphone thus notices which object/iBeacon is nearby, and will be able to react appropriately, e.g., it supplies additional information about the object.

Create simple tours on your own

With Blauzahn™ we support you to create and manage complex stories that play outdoors as well as in buildings. If you want to create a linear tour that takes place outdoors only, we can recommend our partner inTrails With inTrails you can configure a tour yourself with an easy-to-use interface at very low cost. Unlike Blauzahn™, it can also contain text, pictures and videos displayed on the smartphone.

Do you want to publish a Blauzahn™-story?

Get in touch with Andreas Garzotto GmbH.