It's an electronic tour guide, camera and multimedia travel diary all in one hand-held PDA.

Re:call knows where you are, and as you wander, it offers multimedia snippets on history and culture within your line of sight.

Want a coffee or showtimes at a nearby theatre? Re:call's got the details along with reviews posted by previous users. Take a photo or make notes, and re:call saves it in your electronic journal along with the time, location, and information links related to that location.

Re:call is an application prototype from Mobile MUSE (Media-rich Urban Shared Experience) Research Network -- an industry and academic consortium including Telus, Nokia, New Media BC, Simon Fraser University and the University of B.C.

It's being tested on the HP IPAQ 3715 Pocket PC and uses WiFi triangulation to track geographic location, with a eye to use on devices that are likely to be standard five years from now.

"It's a tour guide and travel diary with the ability to engage in community sharing," said project leader Julie Zilber who was testing the prototype with passersby at Vancouver's Granville Island Thursday.

Users can attach reviews or personal comments to specific geographic locations.

"It's a way of leaving digital graffiti around a city. It's almost mobile blogging," said Jim Fawcett, president of Exponentia, a Vancouver-based software development and new media company involved in re:call's back end content management system.

"It's a way to say 'I was here' without messing up the bridge," Fawcett said in an interview.

Another use could be as a means of networking for all Australian visitors to the Olympics, Zilber suggested.

Creating a marketable tourism product from the existing prototype would probably take a year, estimated Zilber, who does not anticipate participating in product commercialization.

There are a number of possible business models. The device could be rented out to visitors at a particular attraction. A few years later, if large-screen, high speed, WiFi, photo and video capable PDAs are widely owned, users could perhaps simply subscribe to a service that covers a particular geographic area.

While re:call has obvious applications in tourism and had already attracted queries from convention and culinary tourism organizers, Zilber believes tourism is a short-term model and is moving on to study how mobile devices can be used in social networking.

She is interested in the idea of leaving personal information attached to physical locations. Imagine passersby leaving feedback for use in urban planning or tagging memorial benches and tombstones with multimedia material, she said.

Key questions will include finding means to filter material for personal interest and to allow users to share content with self-identified groups.

The re:call project was funded by Canadian Heritage and is a collaboration between SFU's 7th Floor Media, Exponentia, and Tejinder Randhawa. Mobile MUSE was launched last year with $1.6 million from Canadian Heritage and Western Economic Development to discover what people want and will use in the way of mobile content.