Your handheld tour guide
Published 12:01 am Saturday, June 25, 2011
Just by downloading an iPhone app, you can be your own tour guide of the Mountain Loop Highway, the cities of Snohomish and Granite Falls, or the Future of Flight and other aviation attractions in Snohomish County.
Even if you don’t have an iPhone, you can still have a historian in your pocke
t as long as you own a cellphone.
And nowadays who doesn’t?
That’s what the Snohomish County Tourism Bureau was banking on when it created four self-guided cyber or virtual tours: putting history in the hands of as many people as possible.
“Everyone has a cellphone so obviously
the whole mobile experience has been growing for the last several years,” said Amy Spain, executive director of the tourism bureau. “With smart phones there are whole new ways of getting out information instantly and completely.”
Spain hooked up with Fred Cruger, vice president of the Granite Falls Historical Society. Together they created cyber tours of some of Snohomish County’s attractions.
The way it works is this:
Start by picking up one of the Self-Guided Cyber Tour brochures. The four tours created so far are: The city of Snohomish, the city of Granite Falls, Mountain Loop Highway and Aviation Adventures.
In the future there may be a cyber tour available for the Centennial Trail, but that project is still in the works.
You can use the brochure’s map as a guide while you are touring, or not.
The brochures were published about a month ago, but in this virtual world we live in they were not meant to be all the information a person needed for a tour, just a way to connect to the Internet, Spain said.
“We see it as a great opportunity to get information in the hands of people,” Spain said. “They don’t even have to pick up the brochures. It doesn’t require paper; just capture the QR code and off you go.”
Capturing the QR or Quick Release code is as easy as taking a picture, and it frees you from having to type in a website or URL on your phone.
All you do before you begin a tour is download a free QR code reader application to your phone. Pick one that is free and has lots of stars so you know it is liked by many users.
Once your QR code reader app is installed, point your phone’s camera at the QR code found on a brochure — it looks like a boxy bar code — and take a picture. The application will read the code and take you to the tour.
In fact, on the Granite Falls walking tour, some of the historic buildings on the tour have the QR code available on the building itself, Cruger said.
“On a walking tour you don’t want to type a URL,” Cruger said. “So you just point your camera at the code, and it goes bleep and up comes the audio and pictures.”
Also, if you own an iPhone, you can download a free application from the Apple store called OnCell that will allow you to stream videos and offers the added benefit of working where there may not be cellphone service.
“If you don’t have cell service you can download the entire tour at once rather than being at the point of interest,” Spain said.
If you want to just hear an audio version of a tour you can dial that up also.
When you listen to one of the tours, it will be Cruger’s voice that you hear.
Cruger said that this cyber tour technology is changing rapidly. So much so, that in probably less than two weeks, the user interface will be improved and be much more “elegant” than it is right now.
“We are trying to get people excited about it,” Cruger said.
Cruger did all this work on the cyber tours for no pay. Spain said it was Cruger’s passion for promoting history and historical organizations that drove him.
Cruger said simply that to bring history to the younger generation, you have to put it in a form they are accustomed to.
“And it’s a great way to actually get people interested in the idea of physically visiting historic sites,” Cruger said. “Like the sites on the Mountain Loop, if they didn’t have a tour like this, they’d just drive along and think ‘This is a pretty drive,’ but it’s so much more than that.”
Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424; goffredo@heraldnet.com.
Take a tour
Pick up a Self-Guided Cyber Tour brochure at any of the following Snohomish County Visitor Information Centers:
• South Snohomish County Branch at Heritage Park, 19921 Poplar Way, Lynnwood, 425-776-3977. Hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays; 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays.
• North Snohomish County Branch, 3710 168th St. NE, Suite C101, Arlington, 360-657-2326. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day.
• East Snohomish County Branch, 1301 First St., Snohomish, 360-862-9609. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day.
• Everett Tourism & Visitor Services, 2000 Hewitt Ave., Suite 120, Everett, 425-263-9001. Hours: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.
• Mountain Loop Tourism Bureau at Mark’s Country Store, 108. W. Stanley St.,Granite Falls, 360-691-3395. Hours: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily.
