Virtual Tour App
Sangam
Classroom Project • Augmented Reality • Tourism
Project Info
Time: 4 weeks
Team members (2):
Lavanya Arya
Preksha Gupta
Type:
Classroom Project
Industry
Travel & Tourism
Virtual Tourism
Augmented Reality
Role
UX
UI
Strategy
Tools
Miro
Figma
Illustrator
This is a classroom project with the brief to innovate any chosen industry with upcoming trends. I chose travel & tourism industry. The project was done in a team of 2 where I catered to virtual tourism and the local business management was catered by my counterpart.
The Problem
Uptil 2100 half of the cultural heritage would be lost to depletion and would remain unexplored by explorers, researchers leading to cultural & economic downfall.
The solution proposed is an application capturing the cultural heritage digitally to make it accessible for exploration, employability, preservation & knowledge purposes.
How might we preserve cultural heritage to boost mass engagement, enhance knowledge and employability with the help of technology
Solution
The users can create their avatars for taking pictures on the tour.
The avatar feature has been added for the personalization of their tours.
Avatar creation process is inspired from Bitmoji. The customizations make the avatars unique.
Creating Avatar
The tour can be booked and personal preferences can be added.
Sangam is targeted towards the older age groups as well, therefore according to their insights step-by-step form has been given for ease of booking.
Booking an AR Tour
In the real world we encounter local sellers during the tour.
To deliver a similar experience within AR tour the products are placed in AR arena by the local businesses. The local businesses are onboarded first on their platform first. Using this feature users can quickly tap and add products to cart.
Shopping on the Tour
Tourists like to save memories of the place by taking pictures with the place.
AR photography delivers that experience by the usage of AR models. When the user chooses an AR model, it is casted behind the humans and pets.
The model gets casted in the original monument to human scale, giving a realistic effect.
AR Photography
Heritage Depletion Problem
The team started with 5Y model to find the root cause of receding tourism industry growth. The final stage implies that people want the heritage sites accessible which leads to the reasoning for heritage preservation for accessibility.
The 5 W+H lead to possible solutions for the problem inspired by the existing solutions. This activity gave an overview of the project problem and a direction towards usage of technologies like AR, VR.
Scope in Digital Tourism
Through considering the fact about countries investing in upcoming technology for making tourism digitally available, the scope of digital replica for preservation arises. The platform would also employ people across tourism industry and educate public about cultural heritage.
Competitor Analysis
Amongst the top competitors, Culture App had the most features to engage the virtual tourists. While Google Arts & Culture is meant for engaging way of learning and Augtraveler utilises AR to showcase cultural places.
Insights
We collected insights from our target audience regarding heritage tourism.
Current Scenario & Business Proposition
Through the understanding of current scenario the target audience needs hassle free tourism.
From this understanding the final solution would be an app for AR tourism with after activities.
The app would employ travel guides and local businesses for income generation.
Persona & Journey Map
The persona describes an endemic impacted elderly lady who wants to explore the cultural heritage.
She wants to take independent & quick decisions, hence the opportunities lies in such features.
Task Prioritization & Flow
The tasks for travel seeker mainly consisted of exploring the AR tours, creating their own avatars & checking out various after activities. Other tasks included account and setting related tasks.
Testing the Concepts
The concepts for viewing mode i.e. portrait or landscape mode had to be chosen.
Hence paper prototype was created to test the comfort with either concepts.
Finally the users went ahead with the portrait mode.
UI Guide: Rani
The UI inspiration is drawn from the images & digital solutions of cultural heritage.
Material Design System is utilised to create design system Rani for Sangam.
Design Evaluation & Iterations
The app prototype was tested with 8 users.
The users first explored the app open-handedly and then performed tasks.
At the end they were asked to provide verbal and likert scale feedback.
Through user insights it was clear that AR feature needs to be learnt at first, hence apart from virtual guide a tooltip or hint was required.
The 'Info' button was added at the bottom for users to access it anytime to get a suggestion for the next action.
New Feature
Next Steps
The app can be tested with a variety of different users to understand their specific needs.
The target user base is comprised of working people, therefore app can be made collaborative for their experience by imitating their travel based activities.
