Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

Press release (part of it) on the Mobilizy website:

Lonely Planet, the world’s favorite travel company, has teamed up with mobile augmented reality pioneer Mobilizy to bring a world-class mobile AR experience to their renowned travel guides. Whether you are a seasoned traveller or fledgling explorer, Lonely Planet Compass guides provide expert recommendation and useful information to help you navigate city locations.

Lonely Planet Compass guides offer a unique augmented reality experience to extend your travel adventure with useful information about your surroundings, nearby landmarks, and other points of interest by overlaying information on the real-time camera view of your Android phone.

Looking for the ultimate guidebook? One you can slip in your pocket? Lonely Planet’s Compass Guides for Android give you interactive, personalized and fully searchable mobile access to Lonely Planet’s best-selling travel content .

Currently there are 10 Lonely Planet Compass Guides enhanced with Wikitude AR available for the Android market in the US: Boston, Chicago, Miami, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle and Washington D.C. More titles are coming soon.

Features of the Lonely Planet guides enhanced with augmented reality include:

• Enabled with GPS so you can see your current location and plot itineraries on dynamic maps;

• Augmented reality camera-view to visualize data overlays of Lonely Planet recommended points of interest;
• Hundreds of listings for places of interest – bars, clubs, restaurants and more – search by category, distance, or by address and
• Helpful information on the city, its history and events and more.

Visit the website for more screenshots of the application.
Good to see an application by a brand like Lonely Planet. Their books can be augmented as well to make an offline-online connection and intertwine their channels and business models.
The content was already available by Lonely Planet, thus extending this information to the mobile digital realm was a logical move which responds to the rise of Augmented Reality.

For travelers it’s a new and interactive experience to discover their travel destinations and address to the vast amount of information digitally to enhance their knowledge.
Who knows the Lonely Planet Guides will become 2.0 due to collaborative efforts by users, and what the effect will be for the product and information quality.