What's
Ubiquitous Museum Onomichi

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Onomichi city, Hiroshima, is like one big museum itself. The city is full of stories waiting to be found, not just in major tourist attractions but also in the corners of everyday slopes and alleys.

As you stroll around the city, you may wonder: "where is this?" "Are there any interesting tourist sites nearby?"

That's when you should look for a stone owl, your guide of the city. Oh, here is our guide.

You now place your mobile phone near the stone owl, as if using a magnifying glass. Then, use your phone's bar-code reader to read the bar-code on the owl.

Just like that, you can freely access tourist information, or memories and histories related to a particular place in the city.

According to the stone owl, this enchanting slope that I am walking on, is the very slope Naoya Shiga, a prominent novelist of modern Japan, walked up and down about 90 years ago.

And the experience is described in Shiga's "A dark night's passing" as follows:

"he cut through the temple and came to a mountain, but got lost in the maze of a winding slope..." Aha! Reading the line on the very spot provokes more sense of really being part of the story than reading it at home or in a library.

So, in a nutshell, this portable navigation system, "Ubiquitous Museum" is a system that transforms an entire city into an organic, ever-evolving archive and a museum of history.

When strolling around an unfamiliar town, we often refer to guide books. However, guide books may not always provide us with the information we want on the spot.

Sometimes, information boards may confuse you, or spoil the scenery.

With this portable navigation system, guide books are no longer necessary! Tourist information is accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

With "Self-Centered Map," you can easily find places like restrooms and cafes.

Another feature of this system is that tourists can use their mobile phones to add their impressions and questions to the system.

In this system, once-one-way information now travels beyond the confines of time and space, connecting people and information, which then leads to discoveries. So this is not merely a tool for tourism but for city-planning as well.

The Ubiquitous Museum enabled by the portable navigation system, is no less an organic museum continuously evolving with the input of those who visit the city.