Create some content
Content is King! Whether or your tour is a superstar experience or not depends on how well you can craft the content. That’s outside the scope of this tutorial. Sometime later on I’ll write up some tutorials / guidelines on how to create great content. For now let us focus on getting the experience running and use whatever we have to hand. We need content in the form of pictures, audio or video files.
Content Resolution Aside (you don’t need to understand this bit)
What’s nice about standard format of modern tablets is their preferred resolution is 16:10. If this means nothing to you – it’s the ratio of the long side of the screen to the short side. Modern TVs are 16:9 – also known as widescreen. What this means is if you show widescreen content on a tablet you’ll left with a gap at the top or bottom of the screen. We can use this extra space to our advantage and use it to add any user interface that we want – perhaps a description of the content or buttons.
The resolution of the Nexus 7 (2013) is 1920 x 1200 whereas full HD is 1920 x 1080 – so that leaves us a strip of 1920 x 120 pixels at the top of the screen for the user interface bits.
Example Content
Keeping this in mind it will look best if our content fills the screen – so we want to create our photos and videos in a 1920 x 1080 resolution. We’ll also limit our device to landscape mode.
If you don’t have any content to hand then you can use my example ones:
- Audio from the British Museum Audio Guide: Lion.mp3
- Video from The Commandery at Worcester: CityOfficial.mp4
- Image (with text) from The Commandery at Worcester: CivilWar.jpg
Right click these, choose save as and save them on your local machine.
Copy content onto the Android Device
As I’ve mentioned there’s a more advanced way to do this but for now we’re going to simply connect the device to your computer and copy the files across.
You’ll need a USB lead (probably micro USB lead) to connect your computer to the device.
Once connected, your device should pop up on your computer the same way as a USB memory stick does. So on my computer I can see a new device called ‘Nexus 7’. Sometimes android devices default to just charging – so you may need to check on your device that it is connected for ‘File Transfers’. If you don’t see this option at all it probably means you have a USB cable that is only designed for charging – so grab yourself a different lead!
Open up your device using your file browser.
- On your device create a folder called NFC
- Inside the NFC folder, create a folder called Content
- Copy your content into the Content folder
Once it’s finished copying you can disconnect your device.
If you wish you can double check that the content is in the correct place on your android device by using a file browser application. My preference is for this is: Simple File Manager.