THE VISION
Everyone loves to travel but no one wants to be a tourist. The world spends more than $300 billion every year on leisure travel, yet when we finally arrive at places we long dreamed of seeing, history remains hidden. We can neither see nor hear the essential drama and excitement that made these places famous. A deeper involvement eludes us and instead we are left to discover only brochures, tour guides and fellow tourists taking selfies.
The Augmented Traveler PastPort™ puts time travel in the palm of your hand. On the screen of your smart phone or tablet, we use Augmented Reality to immerse you in three-dimensional stories. Watch history come alive as you stand at famous places and mingle with personalities from the past.
The Augmented Traveler overlays specially created past events and realistically streams them onto the screen of your mobile device. Our fully realized three-dimensional characters move correctly through space from your perspective. They bring you into another place and time with such realism that you will swear you are there to witness historically credible moments. You become the perceptive visitor instead of the unaware tourist.
INSPIRATION
The Augmented Traveler was born in the medieval square of Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy, when co-founder Bruce Benson learned that da Vinci had spent several months there in the early 1500’s. He wondered what it would have been like to see the renaissance master stride across the piazza and he imagined a voice saying, “Welcome to the 15th century. We can’t say for certain if events you are about to see actually happened but it’s highly likely that they could have.”
Now a handsome Leonardo strode briskly across Piazza Maggiore, shoulders hunched in earnest conversation, gesturing towards a strange machine sitting on display in the piazza. It was the world’s first tank, and da Vinci was talking with his apprentice about a demonstration for the military prince of the region.
All boring information from dull exhibits and lectures was thrown out the window. da Vinci and his machine seemed like a living spectacle. To bring alive the concept of immersing viewers in authentic experiences out of the past, in the places where they happened long ago, Benson and team have turned to Augmented Reality.
OUR DEMO
We have produced an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product, and with it have successfully moved from concept to execution.
Our demonstration places you in St. Mark’s Square in Venice on a spring day in 1499, where you meet and can interact with Leonardo da Vinci and his apprentice, Salai, in either English or Italian. You witness them getting ready to fire an enormous war machine that da Vinci has designed for a presentation to the doge of Venice. We are ready to build out this app to a beta commercial product.
We propose to launch at Venice, Italy, where we have solid marketing research and a financially viable business model. Depending on investor requirements, the app could launch equally well in several other European cities with compact, historical city centers that are walkable and with excellent public transportation.
RESEARCH STUDY
(University of Padova – Italy)
Will tourists pay a fee for an Augmented Reality travel app on their smart phones that lets them mingle with historical personalities while visiting famous places?
The answer is that they certainly will, according to a University of Padova investigation into the marketing potential of the Augmented Traveler. Dr. Sylvia Sedita, associate professor of economics and business development, led the research. She assigned 71 advanced third-year marketing students to do a survey and prepare marketing proposals during the fall semester of 2016-2017.
The work included creating advertising campaigns based on the use of Google analytics. Serena Pasqualetto, international e-commerce specialist at FiloBlu, a large marketing agency in Italy’s Veneto, led the advertising and analytics elements of the research.
Students queried 286 tourists at St. Mark’s Square in Venice over the course of a week and showed them an Augmented Traveler demonstration story on smart phones. The visitors were briefly immersed in a 3D Augmented Reality story about Leonardo da Vinci and his apprentice as they prepared a gigantic war machine to defend Venice against a fleet of invaders in the nearby Venetian lagoon.
Three out of four visitors said they would be glad to pay from €1 to more than €5 euro for similar stories. The survey carries a confidence factor of confidence factor of 95% (±3%).
WHO WE ARE
Bruce Benson
Co-founder and President/CEO
He is an award-winning former feature storywriter and science writer for daily newspapers in California and Hawaii; for many years he was the Hawaii correspondent for the Washington Post. He studied energy issues at Stanford as a Professional Journalism Fellow. Later he was the marketing director for an upscale hotel and resort company in Hawaii where he managed national and international tour-and-travel development. He owned a marketing agency with a focus on accounts in travel, science and technology.
John Cullen
Professional Engineering Adviser
He is a vice president at a major software engineering company in Los Angeles. John knows how to build and lead teams to develop great software and has driven projects to completion at firms such as Oracle, Yahoo and Ricoh. He holds 33 patents on algorithms and systems for Image Processing and is a member of IEEE and PMI.
Francesco dell'Oglio
Partnership Manager in Italy
He is responsible for introducing the company to investors and to others with the potential to help us grow. He consults on technological aspects of the project as well as our online marketing. Francesco is also our webmaster and multimedia editor. He founded and is administrator of websites and online forums with millions of visitors per month.
Raleigh Tomlinson
UX Designer
Raleigh is responsible for the interface of the app. She takes a research centered approach to design, iterating around user feedback. Raleigh considers top business and user needs in order to prioritize features for development. She holds a Bachelors of Science from Humboldt State University in California and has traveled around the world while working as a freelancer developing products.
Chiara Scaramuzzino
Data Scientist
She is creating the foundation for using contextual data to introduce specific experiences. She analyzes the way users interact with the mobile application and will supervise the creation of a database of metadata collected over time. Chiara holds a BS in International Trade from the University of Turin and a MS in Agricultural Economics from the University of Hohenheim, Germany.
J. Marshall Pittman
Co-Founder and CTO
He is the key technologist responsible for bringing to life our vision of using AR to create on-site three-dimensional experiences with full-sized characters. He has led the company’s technical development for the past two years to produce the Augmented Traveler MVP. He is Professor of Communication Design in AR/VR, Game Art and Animation at Collin College in Dallas, Texas, where he specializes in character rigging and animation pipelines, focusing on AR and VR.
Phil Taylor
Professional Business Adviser for Italy
Educated at Cambridge and a long-time resident of Italy, Phil is managing partner at Phil Taylor Consultants in Bologna where his business clients have included Lamborghini, Ducati, Toyota, Calzoni, BASF, Caterpillar, UniBo, Hera and many others. He serves as Great Britain’s Honorary Consul for Trade to Italy. He helped found Polimoda with Gucci and Versace and was its General Manager for 7 years.
Laura Carsillo
Professional Historical Places Consultant
She holds a doctorate degree in art history and worked for UNESCO World Heritage in Florence. She is founder and creative director of Passeggiate Italiane.
Bruce Benson
Co-founder and President/CEO
He is an award-winning former feature storywriter and science writer for daily newspapers in California and Hawaii; for many years he was the Hawaii correspondent for the Washington Post. He studied energy issues at Stanford as a Professional Journalism Fellow. Later he was the marketing director for an upscale hotel and resort company in Hawaii where he managed national and international tour-and-travel development. He owned a marketing agency with a focus on accounts in travel, science and technology.
J. Marshall Pittman
Co-Founder and CTO
He is the key technologist responsible for bringing to life our vision of using AR to create on-site three-dimensional experiences with full-sized characters. He has led the company’s technical development for the past two years to produce the Augmented Traveler MVP. He is Professor of Communication Design in AR/VR, Game Art and Animation at Collin College in Dallas, Texas, where he specializes in character rigging and animation pipelines, focusing on AR and VR.
John Cullen
Professional Engineering Adviser
He is a vice president at a major software engineering company in Los Angeles. John knows how to build and lead teams to develop great software and has driven projects to completion at firms such as Oracle, Yahoo and Ricoh. He holds 33 patents on algorithms and systems for Image Processing and is a member of IEEE and PMI.
Phil Taylor
Professional Business Adviser for Italy
Educated at Cambridge and a long-time resident of Italy, Phil is managing partner at Phil Taylor Consultants in Bologna where his business clients have included Lamborghini, Ducati, Toyota, Calzoni, BASF, Caterpillar, UniBo, Hera and many others. He serves as Great Britain’s Honorary Consul for Trade to Italy. He helped found Polimoda with Gucci and Versace and was its General Manager for 7 years.
Laura Carsillo
Professional Historical Places Consultant
She holds a doctorate degree in art history and worked for UNESCO World Heritage in Florence. She is founder and creative director of Passeggiate Italiane.
Francesco dell'Oglio
Partnership Manager in Italy
He is responsible for introducing the company to investors and to others with the potential to help us grow. He consults on technological aspects of the project as well as our online marketing. Francesco is also our webmaster and multimedia editor. He founded and is administrator of websites and online forums with millions of visitors per month.
Raleigh Tomlinson
UX Designer
Raleigh is responsible for the interface of the app. She takes a research centered approach to design, iterating around user feedback. Raleigh considers top business and user needs in order to prioritize features for development. She holds a Bachelors of Science from Humboldt State University in California and has traveled around the world while working as a freelancer developing products.
Chiara Scaramuzzino
Data Scientist
She is creating the foundation for using contextual data to introduce specific experiences. She analyzes the way users interact with the mobile application and will supervise the creation of a database of metadata collected over time. Chiara holds a BS in International Trade from the University of Turin and a MS in Agricultural Economics from the University of Hohenheim, Germany.
CONTACT US
News
New York Times Goes AR
Augmented Reality took another step toward becoming a part of mainstream media when the New York Times rolled out immersive AR experiences for its readers during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. The paper launched AR stories for readers using late-model...
Augmented Traveler Invited to Pitch Competition in Bologna, Italy
The Augmented Traveler was one of 30 projects selected from 180 applications to take part in the 2017 Startup Day sponsored by the University of Bologna. It was the University’s third annual Startup Day, which is a pitch competition organized to introduce promising...
Facebook Opens Its Doors To Augmented Reality
In this Forbes Magazine report, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talks about bringing the immersive experiences of AR to his social network. Facebook posters will be able to enhance images they take with their smartphone cameras. In the future, he expects AR...