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

• Helpful information on the city, its history and events and more

About Lonely Planet:
Lonely Planet is the world’s favourite travel guide company. Lonely Planet’s goal is to help travellers get to the heart of a place. And it’s not just about travel guides. It’s about websites, TV and mobile products too.

Media Contact:
Christina Rittchen
christina.rittchen [at] mobilizy.com
Mobilizy GmbH
Phone: +43 662 45 45 55 – 425
Web: www.mobilizy.com
www.twitter.com/wikitude

It was an intense project with a tight deadline that kept everyone on the Mobilizy team busy: “Thanks to Ogilvy’s clear vision, we were able to deliver on time. Ogilvy knew exactly what they want.”, says project manager Andreas Hauser.

Mobilizy also had a tester on site, visiting the playgrounds at Wimbledon (see this blog). “Of course, it is an experiment, more or less a “trial”. Something like this has never been tried before. Using GPS and Accelerometer has been tested thousands of time with Wikitdude,  but we were not sure if something like this actually works at so close distances. Initial tests were promising. It takes visionares, like Ogilvy, to dare something like this. We’ll see how it’s going to work out during the event.”, reported Christina Rittchen, after returning back to Salzburg.

“The entire team here absolutely loved to work on this project. As much as it was a challenge it also has been an absolute pleasure.”, says Davide Sciola, Digital Producer from OgilvyOne.

Also special thanks to our partner Sengaro. Sengaro is an Innsbruck based company who developed the “offline map” that we are using within the IBM Seer. Sengaro is the company behind “Mobeedo“, the “first multi-purpose information system for the mobile age”.