Bar Z Adventures unveils educational GPS Ranger

If you're one who likes to roam solo, but still yearns for that oh-so-knowledgeable tour guide when strolling through historic landmarks or animal havens, Bar Z Adventures has just the thing to quench your curiosity while on the trails. The GPS Ranger (and self-explanatory Zoo Ranger) handheld devices are being aimed at historic sites, monuments, national parks, cruise lines, and zoos in hopes of giving tourists of any tongue the chance to soak up information about the area they're in without having to play follow the leader. The Windows CE-powered unit sports a 3.5-inch outdoor viewable LCD, 4GB of storage, and integrated GPS that allows a plethora of content ranging from movie / audio clips to lines of text to be displayed when the user encounters certain geographical coordinates. Multimedia tidbits describing statues, animals, battlefields, and essentially anything associated with a given attraction can be triggered when approaching a given landmark, and the device also packs support for a multitude of languages to cater to those international visitors. While we aren't sure how much these tour enhancing gizmos will inflate your activity costs (or how many jobs they'll replace), we can't wait to see the movie clip that gets queued up for these guys.

[Via jkOnTheRun]

[Detrick Naczynski @ Jan 29th 2008 1:09PM]

This is certainly a space that is heating up, Nintendo and Disney just annouced a trial to use the DS to guide kids around(search DS disney on engadge), but I can't imagine that's too open a platform. There is also a company called Flick Software who has a product, the mobile interactive guide, http://www.mobileinteractiveguide.com that seems to be a very open system for content providers and venues. They also seem to be device independant which seems like an obvious feature seeing as hardware changes and improves every 6 months..

[Andre Richardson @ Mar 12th 2008 10:13PM]

Hi, My name is Andre. Can you tell me the price for the GPS Ranger and the software or other components to program it.

THanks,

Andre

[Sunny Smith @ Mar 19th 2008 3:33PM]

Hi Andre,

My name is Sunny Smith and I am the Marketing Manager for BarZ Adventures, the maker of the GPS Ranger. These systems (including hardware, software and content development) are available for venues and tour operators to develop content-rich, multimedia tours for outdoor venues, parks and zoos. Visitors can rent the GPS Ranger for the day from the venues (from $6.95 - $29.95 depending on the venue) to take a fun, self-guided tour that is full of interesting video footage, historical photography, behind-the-scenes facts and trivia. Cost for developing and installing a tour at a venue is dependent on a variety of factors such as length of the tour, level of involvement by our staff for filming and content development, number of units, etc.

We currently have systems installed at Death Valley National Park, Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Site, Cedar Breaks National Monument, San Francisco Zoo, and Key West Florida, just to name a few. If you are interested in learning more about our products, how you can develop a tour or become a reseller, or future venue installations, please visit our website at www.gpsranger.com or give us a call at 512-732-0135.

[Michael Chastain @ Oct 9th 2006 5:18PM]

I've been expecting this technology for a couple years now. The next step is community driven Wiki style "tours"--there are far too many places to be covered by any one company. Personalization is another key. Whether you're interested in photography, flowers, golf, or food you ought to be able to get running commentary as you drive down the road.

There are a million useful ways to integrate GPS with other technology. We've only scratched the surface.

[scott @ May 24th 2007 5:32PM]

There is already a wiki-style gps tour guide web site. Check out http://www.geovative.com where you can create your own tours with audio, image, and text descriptions and then download it into your GPS device!

[Michael Chastain @ May 24th 2007 6:10PM]

Thanks, it looks interesting. I think this is the first time I've ever gotten a reply to a post I made 7 months ago. ;)

[Anthony @ Oct 9th 2006 7:06PM]

The San Francisco Zoo is currently working on a deal to be the first zoo to implement the Zoo Ranger.

[Nick @ Oct 19th 2006 5:49PM]

A company in the UK called Node also provides a solution for location based media. They have a number of implementation partners in Europe and the USA, and are already live at several sites. I don't know much about the GPS Ranger platform, but I do know that Node provide a complete platform including all hardware and a hosted website for creating experiences, and the platform was built from the ground up with location based media in mind, rather than attempting to modify existing technology to suit the need (not a good idea ;-) ). The battery life is 8 hours of continuous video playback, and the video and audio quality is wonderful - I saw it demo'd at an exhibition in London.

[army ranger @ Dec 18th 2007 3:55PM]

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