by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
Intro
Hey geeky travelers and travel geeks, Curious Japan is out! You could jump right away to https://curiosio.com/country/?iso=jp to try it out. We recommend continuing to read how we thought and felt during the creation of Curious Japan. The country is mind-blowing. Six signature trips were created in the process of understanding and ingesting the information. Several of them are presented to you in this making story.
Original Westworld
If you are into robots, artificial intelligence, science fiction, consciousness, matrix, and so forth then you will love visiting the original Westworld called Western Village in Nikko. There are abandoned robots and androids everywhere. You could think about recording emotions, recreating consciousness, offloading/downloading to another body, and unleashing the dark side of sapiens. It’s North of Tokyo. Pilgrimage for AI geeks.
Our mission is the creation of the ultimate advisor-planner-solver for Travel at the level of what Wolfram did for Math. The smartest tech requires the best UX. We periodically think about the approach for designing the best UX — at the visceral level — like reveries in the Westworld. You feel it without noticing it and you love it. Some ideas were outlined in the recent product design post.
“We call them reveries. The old gestures were just generic movements. These are tied to specific memories. That’s the tiny thing that makes them seem real. That makes the guests fall in love with them.” — Bernard/Arnold.
Nikkō is not about the electric park and abandoned droids only. The beauty of nature around Nikkō is stunning. UNESCO heritage site — Shrines and Temples of Nikkō — has been listed since 1999.
Tateyama
That famous snow tunnel and those snow walls that you see on Instagram and Reddit from time to time are from Japan, it’s Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route (立山黒部アルペンルート). The Alpine Route goes through Tateyama aka Mt. Tate in the Hida Mountains with many scenic sites as well as walking trails, including Japan’s largest dam, Kurobe Dam.
We made this beautiful route extremely geeky — along with going up to the mountains, you should go deep, under the mountains, under Mount Ikeno, underground in the Mozumi mine located a super lab called Super-Kamiokande. Neil deGrasse Tyson was stalking the wild neutrino in the boat in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey in that lab. You could visit it on the Japanese Alpine journey.
Kamioka Observatory is a neutrino and gravitational waves laboratory. “A set of groundbreaking neutrino experiments have taken place at the observatory over the past two decades. All of the experiments have been very large and have contributed substantially to the advancement of particle physics, in particular to the study of neutrino astronomy and neutrino oscillation.” — Wikipedia.
Top Gear Special
Once Top Gear geeks performed a race across Japan. Jeremy Clarkson embarks on a captivating race, pitting the Nissan GT-R against Richard Hammond and James May, who rely on the ultra-efficient public transportation, including the remarkable 200 mph Shinkansen Bullet Train.
You could take a road trip without a hurry and experience many beautiful points and places on the same route. You could customize the points or places, duration, number of travelers, and total budget, and get a similar trip overlapping with the original one.
Woodblock Prints
A Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai known simply as Hokusai, was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period, active as a painter and printmaker. He is best known for the woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes the iconic print The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
We decided to throw a bunch of known locations from those 36-view series onto the algorithm and came up with candidate trip plans. Here is one — inspired by the Hokusai places of painting. You could visit them and feel the vibe.
The animated artworks from the woodblock prints were created by another artist known by the name segawa37.
Pokémon Journey
Any gamers-lovers of the Pokémon Go? Remember your participation in the massive stampede chasing pokemons with your phone at night? You could dig down to the roots of how the entire Pokémon universe was created. It all started in Japan.
“The first four major regions introduced in the Pokémon universe are each inspired and based on parts of Japan. Since the location on which the game was based has not been officially announced, various speculations have been made. The cities and landmarks encountered in the media franchise are strikingly similar to real Japanese towns and geographical features.” — Wikivoyage.
We love Niantic’s experiments with Pokémon Go and Ingress games. We see it as the future of the Travel UX. Augmenter Reality is the best possible tech when you are in your destination. Together with Emotional Intelligence, it allows the creation of the ultimate UX in the future Curiosio.
We are thankful to the Japanese people for supporting Ukraine against rashists. Curious Japan was created as a gratitude for the help and solidarity. Thank you for reading down here. Now it’s time to check it out. Stay tuned and always follow your curiosity.
