Travelty – students are developing great smart tourist guide app as part of DIHUB project

This is why Algebra’s graduate students are working on the development of a new app that would represent a new travelling era, without wasting the time searching for information and planning a trip. For example, if you are in a particular city and have a few hours between business meetings, you would be able to turn on the app and enjoy your personalized tour full of interesting facts and anecdotes about buildings and squares around you. Moreover, you could mark in the app that you have, for example, four hours for a city walk. The app would then calculate what would you be able to do and see, depending on your current location, and make the suggestions for you – such as visiting the museums, restaurants or sculptures as well as to recommend you transportation to visit those attractions.

The students are working in an interdisciplinary team called TouristLAB. The team consists of eight members that are skilled in different fields – software engineering, digital marketing and data science. Members of the team are Dino Tretinjak Mesarić, Federica Fioretto, Hrvoje Čardžić, Hrvoje Matković, Ivan Kožul, Kristina Lučić, Petra Barto and Stjepan Bošnjak-Matić. Team members highlight that their vision is to create an app that will improve the travelling experience for many people and make travelling personalized.

How would this work? The Travelty would be an application for travellers who would like to find the tourist attractions quickly and get a personalized tourist tour. App users would create their profiles and mark their preferences and previous trips. Based on that, Travelty would find them places to visit in a city in which they currently are or are planning to visit. The users would have an insight into their previous journeys, reviews of visited places and pictures they posted while visiting them. This would also help get better and more personalized suggestions for the next user’s trip. This explains the “Just fun – no research” slogan of the team and app.

The Travelty app would create recommendations for the user based on the user’s personal preferences. Except for offering suggestions on various locations, users will have the option to search for places. After creating a personalized journey, the user would be presented with an interactive map showing the route with information for every sight the traveller is visiting. When a traveller passes by some city landmark, the app can tell him more about this place – not just historical facts, but also many fun facts and anecdotes. The voice navigation could be turned off and then the information would be presented by text. The Travelty app would represent an encyclopaedia, tour guide and trip planner all in one – in your pocket.

This project represents a great combination of developing a cloud solution and an entrepreneurship adventure. Since the DIHUB project aims to stimulate the collaboration between students, education providers and businesses, the development of the Travelty application is a good example of such a project. Since the app gives recommendations based on the previously gathered data, the cloud technology is at the app’s foundation. It would benefit many travellers to have such a useful tool, whenever they have a few free hours to spend on an interesting place.