State-of-the-Art analysis

GPSmyCity is an app for Android and iOS that offers walking routes, through a city of choice, to sites and attractions for tourists. It uses GPS that places the user on a map and presents colored lines through the map to guide the user to the next site. As the user walks around the map is updated in real time to match the user's current location. There are different kinds of walks (for instance, sightseeing walks and discovery walks) and you can create your own custom walks as well. Each attraction has a description with historical and cultural information that the user can choose to display at any time or when the site is reached. The description can be translated to different languages and its text-size can be modified. A selling point by the provider is that since the app uses GPS, it works entirely offline so no roaming or data plan is needed. The app is mainly aimed at tourists, which is our target group, but it can of course also be used by people who have missed some attractions in their own city.

During our second pilot study we had some ideas that roughly correspond to this app. An obvious limitation of this one is that it is meant for walking tourists only so it doesn't solve transportation problems, nor does it provide tickets to the attractions. It lacks an online mode so it doesn't provide real time updates on for instance traffic conditions or current events like temporary exhibitions and clubs. Another useful thing would be the ability for external organizations to put their own attractions in the guide and have it automatically show up in the app under some good classification system. If this is then combined with users putting up their own curated tours, you'll have a self driven system that evolves to an extent independently from the actions of the app provider.