by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
A new version of Curiosio codenamed Themes is ready. There are two themes in Beta13 for the beginning. The first and default theme is Curious, the second theme is Obscure. We integrated Atlas Obscura places into Curiosio so deeply that you can now create cool road trips in the quirky Obscure theme.
If you can’t help trying the new thing — jump to Curiosio right away, select any country to open the search form, and set the theme to Obscure. See the screen recording below for where and how to click. Notice that we changed the layout of the input controls to the vertical stack.
Obscure Theme
Below are screenshots from our Lab version of Curiosio Beta13. Three similar searches were performed for three different home locations — Austin in Texas, Toronto in Canada, London in the UK. All requests were for 2 travelers from home and back, in own car (means some exclusion zone around the home), 4 days, $600, Obscure theme. Notice those small red markers appended to the POI names in the itineraries.
We decorated Atlas Obscura places with a small red stylized AO marker to simplify debugging and testing in the Lab. Notice how many marked POIs are present in the trip plans; notice that not all recommended POIs are marked as AO. The Obscure theme is a special combination that Curiosio is blending for you using our own knowledge graph, much bigger than AO, that will give you the Atlas Obscura’ish experience when you visit them.
The Production instance of Curiosio will not show those small red markers for two reasons: 1) it’s a trademark, can’t be used 2) we are building a unique Obscure theme that is not 100% identical to Atlas Obscura.
In the future versions, when you are interacting with the theme, Curiosio will learn better what you like there and blend the points even smarter — empathically smarter — unique theme for each traveler or a group.
Curious vs. Obscure
Let’s compare how the trip plans differ between these two themes. Here are two cases in the United States. Both for the American residents, driving from home and back in their own car.
Case 1. Starting in New York City and finishing in New York City, no required waypoints, perimeter set to include Rochester and Catskills, 2 travelers in own car, 5 days, $600 budget. Two trip plans on the left are in the Obscure theme, one trip plan on the right is in the Curious theme.
Case 2. Starting and finishing in San Francisco. One waypoint is Big Sur, another waypoint is Hawthorne, California. Also 2 travelers in own car 5 days, $600 budget. But let’s start from the search form this time to recall or learn that it is possible, encouraging, and useful to search by multiple points…
Two trip plans on the left are in the Obscure theme, one trip plan on the right is in the Curious theme. Notice that there are points without small red markers in Obscure plans; notice that there points with markers in Curious theme (one in SF case and a few in NYC case).
The light blue rectangle shows the desired perimeter. It is rendered only in the Lab version of Curiosio so that we can test expected vs. experienced geography, and route geometry. We are thinking about some light-easy visualization of the active perimeter in trip plans, so stay tuned for the next versions.
Facelift
Several more things changed in Beta13.
Layout. The first and the most visible is the layout of the input controls on the search form. We switched from the symmetric centered layout to the asymmetric left-centered. This is the first step to re-package all input fields into the vertical stack, on our way to move to the full-screen interactive map. The panel with search form controls will be docked (similar to Google Maps) or floating over the map.
Booking. Before trip plans showed a map with route, itinerary, breakdowns. Now, trip plans show a map with route, itinerary, booking, and breakdown. We separated the booking-related information and actions into the dedicated tab. Curiosio pre-filters Expedia by the number of people, locations, dates, price levels, but you are booking yourself. You can check what’s booked for your convenience to keep things in order. It’s flexible to book the beginning and the ending of the journey while keeping the middle flexible.
Other. Some countries will have their making story linked to the carousel of interactive travel stories. Hint: scroll, look for a drawing of the travel geek. You will definitely notice what we did when you check any recently released countries — Peru, Chile, Argentina.
Fixed Bugs. Fixed several bugs. Aware of several more.
From now, we will continue shipping new countries on top of Beta13. Nordics are in the works. Maybe we will do Nature theme and release with Norway. Or Techno theme and release with Sweden… Stay tuned and follow your curiosity.
