by Vas Mylko, Roman Bilusiak
We have visualized the road trip planning in the United Kingdom. Now you can search and research for your next road trip and see the pictures of the points and places. Originally, we made this [visual] experiment with Curiosio Beta17 and received great feedback. Back then the United States, Italy, and France were visualized. Curious travelers are visuals, so we did not have a choice other than to make it again.
We chose the UK as the next visual country because of their international leadership in helping Ukraine to win the war against the terrorist state of Russia. Hey Brits, thank you so much for the direct military help, financial help, and diplomatic help. Enjoy your peaceful life, and take curious road trips in your beautiful country. You could jump to the website right away by clicking https://curiosio.com?iso=gb but we suggest you keep reading the making story to learn what’s possible for you as travel geeks.
We are eager to visualize Poland and Canada; we would love to add Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia to Curiosio; and Slovakia, Czechia, Denmark, Netherlands, and also make them visual. We are lacking resources so no promises are made about when this will be done. Also, we did not make any changes to Curious Ukraine for the same reason. Though you should be well aware by now that it’s not safe in Ukraine since the 24th of Feb, 2022.
London Flowers
If you are staying in London and want to experience the city and the area around, and don’t want to take long drives you could search for London as your destination. In Curiosio it’s called a Destination trip, we like to call it a Flower trip. Take a look to grasp why.
Here are 7 trip plans for London and its environs for 10 days. All right, it’s not only the vicinity but it’s not too far around London to be comfortably back for the overnight stay.
London is the center of the flower and those drives are the flower’s petals. You are not driving every day, of course, doing a lot of sightseeing in London as your main destination. You could set your own custom smaller perimeter around London if you want.
Here are 7 trip plans for London an its “environs” for 21 days. Almost 2x longer duration than the previous case, notice the richer flowers.
An open trip plan shows See & Do for each day. Each daily programme shows the route between the points and places in the driving or visiting order. (Expanded trip plan view is not shown in this post.)
Round Trip in the North
Take a travel story that you like and customize it to the trip plan you need. Let’s take a classic trip often called North Coast 500. Assuming we want this trip for 7 days. We are opening the Signature Trip from the carousel of the famous trips, hit the [Supertrip] button, change the search parameters — specifically to 7 days and 4 travelers, clear the budget, and keep My Car. One of the proposed trip plans is embedded below:
Quirky Road Trip in the UK
Once one of us spotted this road trip on the web. Our initial reaction was to laugh at it. Then, we decided to test the density of our Knowledge Graph in the UK and tried to make a trip plan through these points with the driving route and the itinerary. Other weird points and places along the route were appreciated.
Let’s fill out the search form and get the automatically proposed trip plans. Twatt, Orkney is a starting point. Shitterton in Bere Regis is a finishing point. Several waypoints are recognized by the current version of Curiosio: Cock Bridge (Aberdeenshire), Cockermouth, Penistone, Fingringhoe. Putting them as travel-thru points. Setting 2 Travelers, Rental Car, Obscure theme, hitting [GET TRIP] red button.
Embedded below is one of the trip plans created by the AI/algorithm. Here and here are two other plans as alternatives in these search requirements.
Out of sheer curiosity, we decided to dig deeper to figure out who and why would ever want to take such a road trip. There are different motivations. From a trip of fundraising for a dying friend to driving thru even more rudely named towns & places for fun. Check out before and after the fundraising trip. Check out the six years of planning of the ‘Rude Trip’ by two brothers.
Travel geek Andy Tait: “I always enjoy going out of my way to have fun and to take things too far… I’d say it’s definitely an alternative way to see Britain. We just found it hilarious. We laughed our asses off at each place and that says a lot about us.”
Curiosio is designed to create unique road trips for travelers who experience the world in their unique way by following their innate curiosity.
Ingeenee Upgrade
Curiosio is running on top of the AI engine Ingeenee. We improved Ingeenee in the scope of Visual UK. Newer Ingeenee is now empowering all the countries present in Curiosio. For the UK we also extended the Knowledge Graph. The extension of the KG has led to some inaccuracy of what belongs to what. We are going to improve the data together with the next releases of Curiosio.
Curiosio Beta18 Progress
Curiosio Beta18 is still in the works. Design & Plans were announced in early June 2022. A few pieces of the new version are present together with the Visual UK release. Some of them are visible, some are not visible but must be emotional or visceral.
The visible piece of v18 is a new menu bar. It contains My Trips new menu item. It is shorter because we moved two menu items down to the footer menu bar. My Trips will be a Netflix of your trips & plans. You’ll need to Sign in to get in there but this is not implemented yet.
My Trips will be a Netflix of your trips. — Vas Mylko
Invisible pieces are related to pre-search context — configuration of the lazy search when you don’t set search parameters. Invisible pieces are also related to post-search context — when you are presented with the search results. You are getting a list of trip plans as a visual interactive carousel. All this was aimed to help you discover and learn the possibilities and discover the opportunities in your trip planning.
Thank you for reading/skimming/scrolling down here. Now it’s the right time to go check the curious roadtripping in the UK. For those who wanna know how we added the United Kingdom to Curiosio for the first time — check out the making story Curious UK from 2021. Stay tuned and always follow your curiosity.
