State of the Art - PocketGuide

We are at this point not completely certain of what product we will develop. But our current idea is an smartphone application that works as a tour guide for when the user is on the boat. This app will show information about a specifik landmark, area or building when pointed at with the smartphone camera. 

I have chosen to analys a very similar app called PockedGuide. This app works as a personal guide when you are sightseeing. If available in the city you want to visit, it will play a voice recording about the different sights around you. By using the built-in GPS it will know where you are and present information depending on your location. 

At this moment it’s hard to find a lot of information about this app. When you enter their website you'll see a commercial video showing very simplistically how the app works. But unfortunately the website lacks a lot of textual information. I did download the app and my first impression is very positive. The app looks good and is very easy to navigate. It will immediately show the city you are closest to. So in my case it shows Stockholm. This is very good for us as this app could be a very good template for our product. Each available tour will start automatically when you are at the start location. I haven’t been able to observe it live not being in Stockholm at this moment, but the tour can be triggered anyway. I chose the tour called ”Stockholm in a Nutshell” that starts in Norrmalmstorg and ends in Södermalm. When you start the tour you can hear a voice-over of the information presented on your screen. One very smart feature that I noticed was how the app will let you know where to look at, like a compass, making it easier to spot what the tour guide is mentioning. This feature is very relevant to us as our app will also need to ”know” were the camera is pointing at. 

I would say that this app is aimed at tourists all over the world. The people who uses this are probably people that travel alone as you could become quite isolated walking around with headphones. But that doesn’t have to be the case. The app can be used at certain points just to view information. Another great feature is that the entire tour including the path on the map can be downloaded and stored locally, which is great because the user would not be forced to be online as this could be quite expensive when you are abroad. 

Under the tab ”Contribute” on the website it is apparent that the creators of this app didn’t ad all the information themselves. They accept tours from different people all over the world and later add them to the app. I hope this information can be useful for our project.