Travel AR was made with some of my best friends from college ( Ethan Weber, Kenneth Friedman, Arlene Siswanto) and submitted to HackMIT 2017. It was some early staging prototyping of what an AR travel experience could be like.
The basic idea behind the app was very simple. You'd be able to pick any sort of place that you'd want to go to in the near future and it would use the Amadeus API to pull up all of the flights/cost information to get to that location as well as generate an AR room of that places biggest attactions. In Augmented Reality you would be able to walk into the room and see the top places on the wall as if it were an art gallery. To get the landmark attractions, the Amadeus API was used, then the Bing image search API was used to pull gallery images of the landmarks you'd be able to see. With each location, we'd also do an informational search and aggregate the infromation about the location (population) to display to users.
Although it would have been nice to really bring in unique 3D experiences from each of the locations, as such information isn't freely available online we thought that taking 2D experiences and putting them in a room together (with no distractions) would be the closes quickly prototypable experinece we would be able to pull off in 24 hours.
We won two awards at HackMIT 2017, the "Amadeus - Best Use of Amadeus APIs" award and the "Sponsor Prize - Concur - Best Travel Hack"
Traveling is exciting - planning, not so much. We thought about different ways to improve the vacation search process and found that visuals were key in selecting the perfect location. Because of this, we created TravelAR, an augmented reality app that allows you to physically step into scenes of different cities, then find flight information if you have found your ideal travel destination.
TravelAR is an iOS travel application built using Apple's ARKit. On opening the app, there is a camera view in the room. Upon tapping, there will be an augmented reality "portal" to another city, where you physically walk inside another "room" and view a gallery of AR scenes from the city. If interested in travel information to the city, there is a pull-up information section where a user can find relevant flight details and prices.
We built TravelAR with Apple's iOS ARKit, a Flask server hosted with Microsoft Azure, and many APIs including the Amadeus Travel APIs, the Microsoft Bing Image Search API, and the WolframAlpha Simple API. The iOS application submits a “GET” request to our Flask server hosted in the cloud with Microsoft Azure. This Flask server takes in a city/location name, and it processes that string with many APIs to extract information—starting with the Amadeus Travel APIs. We hit the Amadeus endpoints with our location to gather information on popular attractions nearby, flight statistics, and other general travel information. We then port the “popular attractions” into the Microsoft Bing Image Search API to get a list of image urls that will be displayed in the iOS application. Furthermore, we use the WolframAlpha API to get information on the population. We combine all of the information with the AR to create a comprehensive visual display with helpful information.
The future vision for TravelAR is creating 3d scenes that are almost indistinguishable from reality. Imagine stepping into the "Paris" portal and being able to view in 3d detail all things around you, the interactions of the community, and experience all of the tourist attractions - right from your home. We would also want to expand this experience by making it social. It would be great to see which of your friends have traveled to a particular location in the past and also to take inspiration from other people's travel experiences.
Amadeus APIs
- popular sites/destinations
- lat / lon
- airport and airport code
- flight info: 3x for the next three weeks each with list of 10 [price, currency, airline, time of day]
Microsoft Bing Image Search API
- images of popular sites (as determined by Amadeus API)
WolframAlpha API
- population
Made by: Avery Lamp, Ethan Weber, Arlene Siswanto, Kenneth Friedman
If you would like to see more things that I (Avery Lamp) has made, check out my:
If you would like to get in contact with me, here is my resume