Next Generation City Guides with AR

Viktor and Wiebke joined us for a fireside chat on immersive city guides and opportunities to unlock destination potentials for travellers.

To begin with, Wiebke began by discussing OneGuide, an immersive city guide they developed that features audio and AR and offers a gamified experience of the destination. TravellAR offers free and premium access for travellers.

To begin with, Wiebke began by discussing OneGuide, an immersive city guide they developed that features audio and AR and offers a gamified experience of the destination. TravellAR offers free and premium access for travellers.

In this session, Viktor Waal, CEO & Founder of SpotAR, and Wiebke Nadzeika, Co-founder of TravellAR, joined us for a fireside chat on immersive city guides and opportunities to unlock destination potentials for travellers.

To begin with, Wiebke began by discussing OneGuide, an immersive city guide they developed that features audio and AR and offers a gamified experience of the destination. TravellAR offers free and premium access for travellers. TravellAR is a small of three people who specialise in business development, podcast and film production and software development. Their solution focuses on quality and integrating audio and AR features for destination experiences.

The free model provides limited content with ads, and the premium model unlocks access to travel guides and city tours, audio and AR features, as well as special experiences such as scavenger hunts. For attractions, OneGuide allows adding content to the app, listing and marketing, regular maintenance and user statistic for an annual license fee.

Wiebke explained that in this sector, two markets exist:

1) The global tourist and activities market and

2) The global AR, VR and MR market which is massively growing and is dominated by massive companies. Wiebke added that currently, 90% of this market is invested in hardware.

Later, Viktor also added that their solution for city guides is focused on content. Their digital solution, Next Generation City Guides, facilitates AR experiences in destinations. He began elaborating on the potential of AR with a quote from Tim Cook, CEO of Apple.

"Augmented Reality will be the key to not only Apple's future, but the Future of Tech."

Next Generation City guides is a content management system where destinations can create digital destination guides. Viktor added that for SpotAR, the next thing would be to reconstruct history through AR and, by doing so, make cultural heritage accessible again. From a technological point of view, developing AR using spatial anchoring could be the next solution where travellers can see AR features on their screens as they explore the city.


Key Takeaways

1. AR-enabled city guide apps allow travellers to explore the destination in a gamified modality.

2. AR facilitates experiencing destinations by overlaying content in spaces. The spatial anchoring feature of AR could enable travellers to unlock features as they explore destinations

3. With content management systems, destinations can create city guides and add immersive audio-visual features.

Published on:
June 2022
About the contributor

Viktor Waal


Viktor Waal's mission is to recreate history or cultural heritage and make this accessible to tourists and citizens using AR.


Wiebke Nadzeika


Wiebke Nadzeika is the Co-Founder of OneGuide, the first travel guide app offering selected travel recommendations, innovative audio guides and mixed reality content.

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