AR City Trail App

The city of Bath wanted to create a unique AR trail app for visitors to explore the Bath World Heritage Site. It was designed to encourage visitors to explore what Bath has to offer and learn something of its importance, from its Roman origins to its Georgian legacy, in a fun and engaging way.

Navigation around the city is via live GPS maps, with the 18 key visitor destinations highlighted. Visitors could choose from four animated avatars to guide them around.

The itinerary planner function optimised the route between attractions to help visitors cram as much into their day as possible.

As visitors reached a destination on the map, they were alerted to open and unlock features. They can find out more about the destination, or they can unlock AR characters and stickers to enable them to create memories of their visits and share them on social media platforms. This feature has proved to be great fun and very popular with the target visitor demographic.

To encourage more general exploration of the city we placed ‘golden acorns’ around the map in addition to the destination focussed AR collectable characters and stickers. On encountering the acorns fun facts about nearby features could be unlocked and collected.

Quantitative and qualitative analytics were incorporated into the app to enable detailed evaluation of the user experience and visitor demographic.