Designing Walkingaia AR for Gaiurb

The Challenge

Gaiurb, EM, was created in 2002 by a decision of the Municipal Council of Vila Nova de Gaia. It is responsible for Urbanism, Social Housing and Urban Rehabilitation of the Municipality of Vila Nova de Gaia. Gaiurb, and the Municipality of Gaia, aim to be part of a dynamic territory identity; an accelerator of national and international investments, with the mission of enduring the city with the ideal conditions to live and create a more sustainable future.

Our client is keen on promoting and making known historic and essential landmarks in the city of Vila Nova de Gaia, besides the usually better-known ones related to Vinho do Porto. They were also looking to take advantage of new technologies and more appealing approaches.
Our team is working with Gaiurb to solve the lack of visibility in the tourist industry. Our client aims to give more relevance to other areas in the City, that aren’t well-known.
Gaiurb challenged our team to upgrade their application and incorporate  AR elements.

Following the defined purposes, our team started to work on the following phases:

• Functional Analysis
• UI/UX Design 
• Development
• Quality Tests
• Deployment

The Solution

For this project, we relied on a multidisciplinary team that combined the expertise of our Creative Tech team and our specialist Cloud team, A Cloud, to design an enhanced version of the AR application that Gaiurb previously had. This new version is based on an integrated approach, focused on our client’s requirements and needs.  

Our technological partner for this project was AWS. This decision was made considering that AWS has plenty of functionalities and provides the best Cloud solutions, technologies and elasticity that our team needed to bring WalkinGaia to life. 

On this project, our team needed to ensure the correct dimensioning of computational capacity, allow an adequate response to the variable flow of accesses, enable lower latency in media content, guarantee data persistence in a self-managed relational database and support access to data, business logic and functionalities in the solution’s backend. For this to happen we rely on Amazon Aurora (Relational Database Management), EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), S3 (Simple Storage Service) AWS Cloudfront and AWS EFS to help us to bring this project forward.

This application was created by using a Rest API with a Backend implemented in Laravel. Laravel is an open-source web application framework for PHP. Using a framework, our developers could build faster by reusing generic components and modules. It also helps long-term maintenance by complying with development standards.

For this project, our main focus was to develop a new and improved version of the Walkingaia AR Platform.

Walkingaia (or Walk in Gaia) AR Platform is a visual orientation project that promotes the uniqueness of Vila Nova de Gaia’s historical centre and its population. Our team was responsible for creating a new stand-alone application with Augmented Reality (AR) functionalities and the development of 4 animations:

• Animation in Mupis
• Facade overlaying animation
• Statement on the wall (Rua Monte Coimbra)
• Animation on the front of the building
• Vuforia Licensing

Conveys a contemplative approach based on the concepts of wandering and serendipity through a set of visual interventions alluding to movements, images, old dynamics and long-gone constructions. Assumes a strategic fluidity, allowing for the surprise factor, through small elements of a lasting or temporary nature, allowing several routes, adjusted to the individuality of each person.

Walkingaia AR Platform is also available as a mobile application for iOS and Android. Having WalkinGaia AR as a mobile application allows Gaiurb to deliver a greater and more tailor-made experience for its users.

This mobile application promotes a series of tours through the historic centre of Vila Nova de Gaia, showing its heritage and identity. The choice is made according to the time and intention of discovery of each user, allowing the contemplation of routes and the countless singularities of this territory at your own pace.

For two years our team will be responsible for delivering AWS Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Managed Services to Gaiurb.