ProblemBeing a visitor or a tourist in a new city is an adventure. You probably have a city map as your primary guidance to look around the city. And mostly, you will try to visit all the famous
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places shown in the map.
One desire could arise while you are enjoying the attractiveness of the city is that you wish to have drinks with your companions or to have chats with the locals or just to have a nice pleasure time. Pubs or bars are the best place to fulfill the wishes with more additions of the city's urban atmosphere. However, sometimes it is hard to be familiar in new places. You probably do not notice a pub nearby or two blocks away from your current position. Moreover, most of the city map do not show such places in details except for the well-known ones or tourist attractions.
In general, we would like to address this problem by having a simple and intuitive instrument with considerations as follows:
It operates in a mobile device (e.g. cellphone, smartphone), It uses maps for better visualization and user interactions, It consumes low computational powers to cope the battery constraint, and It can be used widely in everywhere and anytime.
SolutionWe propose a web mobile application that utilizes and integrates the services through the Internet. The final product will serve as an interactive city guide which promotes the city's pubs and bars. The idea of the application is to search pubs or bars that locate near around the user position. Thus, the application shall constrain itself in a short number of distance, e.g. in a radius of less than 1 kilometer, as the boundary. In our opinion, this initial constraint is a better approach rather than showing all the pubs and bars at once. The benefits are the application is more intuitive and faster.
We use two Google products, i.e. Google Maps API and Google Android in order to implement the idea. The Google Maps API serves as the map service provider and the Google Android serves as the operating system platform for the mobile device. While the data exchange is using the Web Service technology with JSON as the data exchange format.
FeaturesSeveral key features:
Find the nearest pubs or bars given a certain number of distance from the user position (less than 1 kilometer). Visualize the pubs or bars location in a map. Filter (or critique) the result in order to narrow down the selections. Show the pub's or bar's profile (e.g. the opening hours, address, prices, drink menu, facilities, etc.). Show the pub's or bar's sample images. Show the walking directions from the user position to the nearest pub or bar (optional).
Prototype [Less]