Everyday city tourism mobile apps are gaining more and more popularity. This is quite obvious, as their advantages lay in the newest technologies for providing interactive investigating of places, sights, routes for individual acquaintance with the city. Because it's far more interesting to discover a city with the help of your smartphone and tourism app.
Task
Our team got a public order from the city government to develop a tourism app. One of its key features is the use of augmented reality technology (AR).
App Functional
The created platform provides:
- historical information about the places of interest and their location;
- routes of walking tours with audio-guide;
- 3D models of sights in augmented reality;
- information about working time, contacts, photos, and descriptions of hotels, cafes, restaurants, and museums.
Yandex Mapkit
The central element of the application is the map screen. It provides several key features at once: displaying of cultural objects, route calculation, and tracking of the current position. To implement this function, the instrument of the Yandex company, Mapkit, was chosen. Its Android integration supposes the registration of the project and obtaining the access key to the Yandex Maps API.
Yandex provides wide opportunities for working with maps. All the functional is divided by the developers into several libraries. We used the MapKit Transport library, that solves the problem of building the walking tours according to the coordinates of the beginning and endpoints of a tour. Its ready solutions are suitable only for basic projects. SDK developers described various types of interfaces that allow creating customized algorithms.
As a rule, tourists use their devices under unstable internet connections. This difficulty was solved by saving the necessary information on the phone. A user may choose and download audio files from interesting categories in advance.
Summing up, the application developed by our team lets create a smart approach for data cashing according to the needs and requirements of the client, as well as the features of operating conditions. This tourism app is a user-friendly and useful tool to get acquainted with a city.
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