Advances in positioning technologies have resulted in a surge of location-based recommendation systems for mobile devices. A central challenge in these systems is to avoid the so-called filter bubble effect, i.e., that people are not only exposed to information that is in line with their personal ecosystem, but that they can also discover novel and otherwise interesting content. We present results from a field study of a mobile recommendation system that has been aimed to support serendipitous discovery of events at an urban culture festival. Results from the study indicate that suitably designed recommendations together with access to relevant external information sources can lead to serendipitous discovery of new content, such as new artists, bands or individual songs. Our results also indicate that proximity has little effect on the effectiveness of serendipitous recommendations.
['Andreas Forsblom', 'Petteri Nurmi', 'Pirkka Åman', 'Lassi A. Liikkanen']
Out of the bubble: serendipitous even recommendations at an urban music festival