On 12th Nov 2018, WAM Tourism Platform was launched in the rural North Pennines region in England to promote local events and local heritage content (oral histories in audio/video format) to WAM users in the region. It now enables tourists within the North Pennines region to search and orient towards local event locations & heritage places along with engaging with audio/video oral histories. The events & heritage content is powered by WAM Tourism Platform.
The tourists within the region can see a new section called “Discover North Pennines”, which enables heritage storytelling, on WAM on both iOS & Android. The tourism platform brought the following features to the local DMO.
- Realtime publishing of local events information (text, images)
- Realtime publishing of local heritage places information (audio/video)
- Monitor regional user-engagement with businesses, events & heritage places.
- Target content to tourists using “World Around Me” (WAM) app
- WAM app is available in 26 languages in 200+ countries.
- Highlight wheel-chair accessibility.
- WAM app is editor’s choice app on Google Play.
- WAM app helps tourists to orient using phone camera.
- Regular platform maintenance & updates.
- WAM app has won multiple global awards.
The local DMO received the following benefits using WAM app the WAM Tourism Platform.
- World class off the shelf solution.
- Increase tourist’s local spend & engagement.
- Acquire market intelligence
- Increase tourist’s loyalty by promoting heritage.
- Savings on development & maintenance costs
- Target a multilingual users in your region.
- Provide an intuitive local discovery experience to tourists.
- Focus on content curation & offload mobile-IT infrastructure.
A tourist’s local heritage discovery experience is shown in the video below.
Over the course of 2019 WAM Tourism platform has been received well by the tourism business community who promoted WAM to visitors in the region.
If you happen to arrive in the rural North Pennines then you’ll be presented with the local heritage and events search categories. Remember that WAM works worldwide – so you can download and use it wherever you are. Remember to use in during your visit to the stunning North Pennines.
World Around Me (WAM) is an augmented reality based local discovery app that helps people in finding places to eat, drink, shop, stay, commute, pray, refuel, keep healthy or access money anywhere in the world. Available in 26 languages on iOS and Android, World Around Me is being used in 200+ countries. WAM helps people visually orient towards a place by using their phone camera – without getting lost in maps. This is a novel discovery experience provided with augmented reality. World Around Me also provides reviews, contact details and lots of essential information about the place of interest.
How many times have you struggled to find the first step in the right direction towards your destination? Often times while using a map we walk in one direction and say, “Ooops! Wrong direction! Need to go back”. Good news is that you can just “WAM” places on the phone camera right now!
World Around Me is Editor’s Choice app on Google Play and was on one of Best apps of 2017 on Google Play. Earlier in 2016 World Around Me was awarded Google Play Award in Early Adopter category at a special ceremony conducted at Google HQ in Silicon Valley. It was selected as one of the top 10 apps among 4.6 million apps available on Android.
In Dec 2018 WAM was selected as one of the best apps for 2018 on Huawei’s app gallery globally. It has been promoted many times by Samsung, Google ad Huawei on their app stores. WAM also has partnerships with TripAdvisor.
UK’s Department of Culture, Media & Sports, through their £25M 5G test bed program, supported 5G Rural Integrated Test Bed (5GRIT). As part of 5GRIT, the local events, heritage places and oral histories in few villages and towns in the North Pennines have now been made discoverable in augmented reality using the World Around Me (WAM) app, powered by WAM Tourism Platform.