GPS Guide — About

Vokrug Sveta started the GPS Guide project at the end of 2007

We first came up with an idea of a handy tool for independent travelers while editing Vokrug Sveta's travel guides. These guides are the largest and the most popular series of Russian-language guides, covering dozens of countries, regions and cities. The idea was to create an audio guide that would automatically turn on when the user approached a sight of interest. To implement this functionality, we would need to use portable GPS receivers and GPS-enabled cell phones capable of determining the user's exact coordinates and seeing the points of interest nearby. That’s how the format of Vokrug Sveta's GPS Guide was created

The authors of the program had worked on paper guides in the past, so they knew exactly what independent travelers needed. The main rule was “no tour maps or constant flipping of guidebook pages back and forth”. A good multimedia audio guide should give the user as much information as possible and yet be easy to use and exciting.

In order to create a program that would let users walk through a city unchained to a set route while listening to information about important places and sights, we had to forget about conventional principles of GPS navigation and completely overhaul the way content was presented. We had to devise and implement our own algorithm for processing satellite signals and create a practically brand-new format for describing points of interest. We also spent a good deal of time analyzing the way spoken information is perceived and substantially improved the quality of narration in the program

The development of the program took over two years, but the program lived up to all expectations. In creating a new variety of augmented reality, Vokrug Sveta gives travelers fundamentally new opportunities for discovering the world around them.

GPS-Путеводитель

About

Vokrug Sveta started the GPS Guide project at the end of 2007

Read more about Vokrug Sveta's GPS Guide here