About the project

Today, most people regard the Internet as the foremost source of information in their lives. The Internet is where we make contact, with friends, with organizations and events, with products and places. We book and reserve, buy or sell real products and services. In a way, we could say that the Internet is becoming an interface to the real world. Madeira Life is the ultimate portal of Madeira: it offers the residents and visitors of Madeira a highly interactive, social network with mobile and location-aware access. It is the place to share photos, video, audio, and text, and connect this content to where you are, as author or audience. Read blogs that were written where you are, hear stories and see videos about the place, or simply get information about sales and promotions nearby. You can get it right there, right now. Madeira Life will accompany you all over the island and be your best link with the world.

Madeira Life was initiated by the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (Madeira-ITI) in collaboration with Madeira Tecnopolo, ZON Madeira, and Carnegie Mellon University. See the partners page for a description of the project consortium.

The Madeira region has a rather special position in this respect: it represents a relatively small part of the physical world and is literally very strongly bounded. The consequence of this is that the social interactions of its inhabitants in the physical world are more restricted than they are in other parts of the world. While this is perhaps problematic for some, it also offers a strong potential for creating a very special online interface to this bounded part of the world. In analogy with the popular online environment ‘Second Life,’ this new interface to Madeira can be called ‘Madeira Life.’ In contrast to Second Life, however, people who visit Madeira Life will not interact with a virtual world, but with the real world of Madeira.

Madeira Life aims to become the ultimate portal and social web for the Madeira region. Interaction with Madeira Life goes much beyond the social networks that are currently conquering the world. The general functionality that social networks offer include creating a web presence (a home page), a blog, a multi-media blog (video, photos, audio), commenting on these blogs, a recommender system, chat rooms, etc. The functionality of a web portal is generally restricted to offering information providers a chance to divulge their offer and to directing consumer visitors to those offered sites. The novelty of Madeira Life is not just that it integrates these two functions; it adds (1) mobility, (2) location awareness, and (3) a connection to the physical world.

Mobility

Madeira Life has optimised interfaces for both desktop and mobile devices, ensuring a seamless but also dedicated functionality across these different clients and allowing the user to have a continuous dialogue with the platform.

Situation Awareness

Whether visited from the desktop at home or from a mobile device en route, Madeira Life will be aware of the user’s location and current interests, tailoring the offer of information and intelligently presuming certain needs to this specific context, e.g., news-items that can be sorted by proximity and interest.

Connection to the physical world

Interaction with Madeira Life will be an augmentation of interaction with Madeira. As we move through the real world of Madeira, on Madeira Life we will find what we see or want to see, where we are or want to go, and what we hear or like to hear. The Madeira Life project is organised in a series of sub projects that are planned in a well structured design and development process in which usablity evaluation is one of the key aspects. At present, four "pilot projects" are defined to be developed in a waterfall time schedule.