India
You could go directly to beta3.ingeenee.com or click below for intro to India. Continue reading about curious things that we experienced in India, what happened recently, what made impact on the future design.
After Australia we turned our AI to India. Road trips are within Indian culture, roads are good, the population is very big, English is their 2nd language. India is rich and big. The size of touristic graph is big. The physical geographical size of India is big. The shape is tricky, especially around Bangladesh, there is disputed Arunachal Pradesh aka “South Tibet” with China. There is conflict in Jammu and Kashmir.
The most weird border in the world is related to India. Take a look at the map below. India is orange, Bangladesh is cyan. Now notice small cyan dots over orange, and orange dots over cyan. You could find tens of them. Orange is Indian enclaves in Bangladesh. Cyan is Bangladesh enclaves in India.
Once India had 71 enclaves of Bangladesh, which had 7 counter-enclaves of India. During that time Bangladesh had 102 enclaves of India, which had 21 counter-enclaves of Bangladesh, with one of them had 1 counter-counter-enclave of India.
The closest tourist attractions that we have are not enclaves, not in enclaves. So there will be no problems with routing or navigation in the region. Maybe we will add support for few famous enclaves, to make things more curious.
Makeup
Multiple people pushed us to introduce visuals, especially photos. Some people wanted them for inspiration, some wanted for understandable value proposition. First-time users didn’t understand where they landed. We were not adding photos because of three specific reasons:
- Making it a bit harder (from 15m18s) for users to use it, and see who uses it anyways, to filter for real users, then listen to them. Curiosio is a thin wrapper over Ingeenee, pure trip search engine with intentionally minimalistic UI.
- Curiosio is a travel product under construction. Curiosio will have engaging visual proposition. Core design idea is VR & AR for eyes and Una Curiosità for mind.
- Ingeenee is a travel tech — AI for NP-complete optimization. Core design idea is keeping everything meta. To be complementary to maps, transport, encyclopedias, rooms, food, experiences, imagery, video, everything.
On 24th of February we showed Road Trips in Australia on HN. Stayed 22h on top. Multiple people used the site without any visuals and gave feedbacks.
We gathered many interesting feedbacks from the people who live in Australia, who do road trips regularly. Useful feedbacks came from American and other real roadtrippers.
…fast and simple… keep it looking so clean/minimal… not getting into those bloat… — Multiple Hackers from HN
Fast and simple was achieved for modern hardest computational complexity, known as NP-complete, that takes unpredictably long time on arbitrary number of cores, servers, racks, server rooms etc. It is one of Millennium Problems by Claymath Institute. There is a research version in the lab, that is fast for even harder problem: traveler could ask for durations at locations, pin locations to dates, set multi-day placeholders at locations. Bleisure (business + leisure) travelers need that.
The feedback below is perfect in its duality that visuals are needed, but they must not clutter the simple interface. Simplicity & minimalism is needed and visuals are needed, and they are mutually exclusive. How would we do that?
People who travel/roadtrip generally like visuals, which is exactly why so many of the roadtrip guides look more like photography magazines. I’m not sure how you’d do that and keep it looking so clean/minimal (which I quite like)… — Hacker from HN
With India release, we decided to add photos to the landing page, for overall entourage, on big screens. Small screens remained pictureless. The imagery is not related to any selected country. There is a label at the bottom of each picture: “Somewhere on Earth”.
Simplicity & Visuals
As the makeup has happened together with India, let’s continue in this post what the user interface could be. Is it Simplicity vs. Visuals or Simplicity and Visuals, as in the name of this section?
Having mutually exclusive requirements — simplicity vs. rich visuals — is a typical invention pattern from TRIZ. Inventors must be happy when such contradictory requirements happen. It means that one interacts with another within the system. Like cooling vs. heating altogether. The one that requires heating must take the heat from the one that requires cooling. That is a sacred secret how to design for mutual exclusion.
All user interface dots are getting connected — visuals will be the interface — it will be Augmented Virtuality. Virtual Reality for rich visuals, with control flow elements in it, which augment it, hence the name — Augmented Virtuality (AV). The control flow will remain simple & minimal, and there will be true visuals. Both will interact with each other, keeping together as a whole.
User Interface
VR/AV will happen before the trip, AR will happen during the trip. VR providers could be Google (Street View), Mapillary. Mapillary could be cheaper than Google, street level imagery could be sufficient for trip planning. AR providers could be Niantic with Real World Platform, Mapbox. Mapbox experiments with both VR and AR, could be cheaper than Niantic. Future transport will become AR-in-motion.
UI could be mapless (VR only, AR only) or hybrid (VR + route, AR + route). Similar to what DeepMind did in their city experiments, with navigation without a map, but we could show true route instead of trajectory.
Multi-modal transportation may have impact onto UI design. For rooms, experiences, transportation we plan different interface, because booking and payment imply some constraints. First, we will make it work. Then, we will design it for curious traveler — for you — who made it through this post.
Our master vision of the user interface is interactivity, like Bandersnatch. We are designing for new travel era, beyond 2020. It will be Augmented Virtuality before the trip and Augmented Reality during the trip. Would be cool to become a distinguished maker of the new era. That is it about “makeup”. Road trips in India are here beta3.ingeenee.com.
