by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
New Curiosio allows you to plan cool road trips with travel-through places. You already could search by travel-through points with the previous versions, where a point usually was a city, town, or park. From now individual POIs and places could also be the waypoints of your journeys.
You could jump right away to https://curiosio.com to check it out. We tested in Chrome, Chromium, Firefox browsers. Though we recommend you to keep reading to learn and better understand what we have built and why. Several specific scenarios are going to be covered, with the Starbase and meteors involved. Don’t look up, keep reading for the interesting real-life cases;)
Road trip to Boca Chica
You are an Austinite. You are planning a road trip to the edge of the Earth — 21st-century Spaceport in Boca Chica called Starbase. It is also called SpaceX Starbase, SpaceX South Texas Launch Site, “Starbase” Texas, Boca Chica Spaceport. There is also Boca Chica Village, Boca Chica area… Until Curiosio Beta16 you would have to enter the name of the community Boca Chica Village, Texas. Now, you can enter the famous star place by its multiple alternative names coming to your mind. The star place is still a bit rural…
Here is proof by Chief Starman himself if you don’t believe. Alright, you are selecting the United States in Curiosio, Round trip option, entering Austin, Texas as a home, Starbase as a waypoint. One member of the team is not so much into the rockets as she is into the beaches, so you may want to add Boca Chica Beach together with the Starbase. OK, selecting 4 days in the calendar, 2 travelers, My Car option. You may leave the budget empty. Finally, hit the red button [GET TRIP].
As you are typing the geographic names and POIs Curiosio is assisting you and prompting you with the best match as it is happening. Everything that you have just typed triggers the real-time search, it repeats with every typed character. The phrase that is used for search is shown in bold, like in Google Maps, so no learning is needed from you because everything must look and work familiar. So far search suggestions work only by name; for sure we are going to make them proximity-aware.
Here are examples of created trip plans (link, link) with both Starbase and Boca Chica Beach and more See & Do that you should like.
Road trip to Starbase in Tesla
It’s good for morale and karma to drive or ride your Tesla to the SpaceX Starbase. In the US, Curiosio allows you to plan and take road trips in your Tesla. You can take a trip plan that you like and change it to your needs. Let’s take the one from the previous case and augment it to 4 travelers, Tesla, and keep duration empty to see multiple options.
Below is an example of the trip plans embedded as a widget with a route preview. And here is a couple of other travel options embedded as the links (link, link).
Geeky travelers could read how we implemented Tesla road trips from our previous stories: electrified knowledge graph; integration with tesla.com; product with use cases and UX.
Road trip to Big Bend via Meteor Craters
You were planning a road trip from Austin, TX to the Big Bend National Park for a while. You were aware of the Odessa Meteor Crater somewhere in the area, and you were already planning to visit it as a waypoint of the trip. Recently you watched the Don’t Look Up movie and it made you think big — instead of the ending of life on Earth, you started to think about the starting of life on Earth.
Panspermia is the new flavor to your adventurous Big Bend kayaking and hiking trip. You are thinking about 4.5 billion-year-old meteorites found on Earth containing liquid water along with prebiotic complex organic substances that may be ingredients for life. Thinking of sugars in meteorites, including ribose, suggests that chemical processes on asteroids can produce some organic compounds fundamental to life, and supports the notion of an RNA world prior to a DNA-based origin of life on Earth.
Big Bend National Park is the farthest point from your starting & finishing point Austin. You were aware for years about Odessa Meteor Crater not so far from Austin, but you never visited it. Now, pretty quickly you googled other meteor craters around Austin, and you want them all as waypoints. Your travel-through places are Odessa Meteor Crater, Sierra Madera Crater, Marquez Crater, and Big Bend National Park.
Below is a trip plan opened in map & route mode, to demonstrate the presence of the requested meteor craters on the route. Big Bend National Park is in the left bottom corner.
The idea is that you will not need to google for all the craters — Curiosio will find them for you. Knowing only about Odessa Meteor Crater you are asking for “More like this” and Curiosio is bringing you two more craters in the area, automatically. This is scheduled for some future version.
And a reminder that Curiosio recommends more points and places besides what you directly asked for. Almost everything is clickable. Click the names of points and places to open the Wikipedia page for detailed information about each.
What Else
Two more news to announce with this release:
- Travel-through points and places for Destination trips.
- Search for points and places, including alternative names.
From this version Curiosio allows you to enter waypoints for destination trips. Destination trips were released in the previous version of Curiosio (but it wasn’t possible to specify your own waypoints at the destination or in the vicinity). Now it’s possible to specify your own points & places as a skeleton for Round Trips, Destination Trips, and One-Way Trips.
For the Destination Trips, the search form remains the same visually, but the field for travel-through points is now interactive. You can enter a mix of points and places there that you know and want in your upcoming road trip. Notice how the real-time prompt works, it searches by the partial phrase you have just typed.
Curiosio is trying to create cool trip plans with those points and places that you are aware of and want to visit. And Curiosio will propose to you more interesting points and places that you are not aware of but most probably will like. The concept is this: you are telling Curiosio what you know and want, and Curiosio gives you that plus what you don’t know and will love.
You could share the trip plan you like with others by simply copying the link (aka URL) to the opened trip plan in your browser. Select that https:// string on top of your browser, copy from there, and then paste where you need it.
What’s Next
The major release will be Curiosio Beta17. Overall, these two simultaneous big tasks are next:
- Semantic: 100x denser and 10x more accurate Knowledge Graph.
- Visual: all trip plans with photos and panoramas of the points & places.
We are applying and scaling the semantic technology that we rolled out with the Curious Ukraine experiment. We have already have built a 100x denser knowledge graph for Italy. This will be done incrementally for all two dozen countries present in Curiosio. There are going to be several silent releases on the way. The next prioritized countries are the United States, France; then Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany.
Curiosio Beta17 will be the Visual version — the trip plans that your got will have imagery, much like the signature trips have. Below is a look & feel for how visuals work right now for signature trips — on the example of The Great Lakes road trip. In the next version, we are going to implement that way of visualization for all trip plans that you are making with us.
The priority is set for the United States, France, Italy. Then we will most probably make visuals for Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. After that, we will add imagery for all 24 countries present in Curiosio for now.
Release Notes
Also, we introduced a line of brand new bugs with Destination and One-Way trips. They are related to the current ongoing work on knowledge graph technology. Though they are visual [affect routing] we hope you will not notice any until we fix them in the nearest future.
Thank you for reading/scrolling/skimming down here. Now it’s the right time to navigate to https://curiosio.com to play with the newest version. Stay tuned, and always follow your curiosity.
