Cathay Pacific Airways and the Hong Kong Tourism Board, in conjunction with McCann Erickson and Dutch mobile marketing and app developer, XS2Theworld, have created an iPhone app to help visitors to Hong Kong find their way around the city-state.  

The app has two functions: to showcase the beauty and variety of Hong Kong; and to make sure visitors can navigate their way through the city easily, finding the best sights, spots, museums, bars and restaurants. All content is held within the device, which means no data roaming charges.

The app used Augmented Reality (AR) to help users find their way around the city. In collaboration with McCann Erickson, who were responsible for the overall design for the app, as well as user experience enhancement, and taking in content relating to the city delivered by Cathay Pacific and HKTB, XS2Theworld created an interface that would make sense of 7,000 points of interest and their related data.

The developers created filters that help visitors flick through irrelevant data easily, such as filtering by distance or what’s around them, and searching restaurants by cuisine. The app is also available in three languages – traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese and English.

“With Augmented Reality, you get a beautiful, high resolution image of the area or hotspot you want to reach, to whet your appetite and help you decide whether you really want to make a visit,” says XS2Theworld CEO, Sander Munsterman. “You can also walk through the city using Augmented Reality mode, so everything you encounter is revealed to you with a narrative, almost as if you have a guide right there with you.”