The City of Venice, Italy, launched a city-wide WiFi network last week providing free access to residents and local businesses. Tourists and visitors can access the Tropos-based network for 5 Euros a day through their Venice Connect website for local information and activities. The service will enable tourists to have broader access to local information as they walk around the City or ride a gondola through the Grand Canal, increasing awareness of local goods and services.

“Ten thousand kilometers of fiber optic, a lot of hot spots, covering all the public libraries … many European cities have WiFi, no other has this kind of wide coverage,” said Michele Vianello, deputy mayor of Venice, who oversaw the project.

Venice city council financed the project with 10 million euros and is now looking for private capital to develop it, Vianello said. The City purchased the Tropos network, which was designed and installed by Vitrociset, a Rome-based system integrator. Venis Spa, a local ICT management and development company, will operate and maintain network operations on behalf of the City.

“Whaiwhai,” a digital WiFi treasure hunt,launched the service, with participation from a team of youths from Venice and Mestre. Each team boarded one of two boats and using mobile Wi-Fi devices, connected to the Internet for clues that guided them to the location of their next clue. As a format, “Whaiwhai” can be adapted for special events and different applications. Italian and English versions of “Whaiwhai” are already available to play in Rome, Florence and Verona and there are plans to export it also to London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco.

“Whaiwhai” will be available from September in a version for iPhone. H-Farm, a private project founded by entrepreneur Riccardo Donadon in 2005, developed the game. The international platform now has 17 start-ups and offices in Cà Tron Treviso, Italy, Seattle and Mumbai, India. The British Museum has asked us to develop a game for inside the London museum, as we’ll hope to do at Rome in the Forum,” he said.

The MIT Mobile Experience Laboratory is conducting advanced research on the future of mobile contents related to the physical environment. In collaboration with Italy’s RAI New Media, they envision how broadcast TV can rethink its role as a provider of content on next-generation smartphones.

Locast provides location-based videos and multimedia content. Content gathered from RAI TV’s historical archives and user-generated media are linked to physical locations in Venice in order to be accessible to all those visiting the space. It consists of a combination of mobile and wearable computing elements supported by a distributed Web application. Locast utilizes location-based narrowcasting, augmenting Italian cities with mobile content related to the physical environment.

The project focuses on the uniqueness of the Italian cities’ heritage superimposing a layer that corresponds to the shared media-based memory of the recent Italian past. It allows users to download the content in proximity of Points of Interests and watch them on their handsets as well as generate their own media and create their own stories. MIT’s Locast offers to users the tools to build personalized itineraries.