Apply HN: Lucal – Discover the world as a local through visual media and VR

9 points by nthtran 10 years ago | 11 comments

Lucal is a mobile platform that lets you explore the world one street, beach or city at a time through local visual media, such as mobile live streams, drone and short videos, timelapses, photos and VR (360° photos and videos). With these geotagged and displayed on a feed alongside an interactive map, you can feel the vibe and lifestyle of the location as it really is from multiple angles on any device. Whether you’re just exploring the world, planning a new journey, finding inspiration or looking to book accommodation in a particular area, it’s the closest thing to actually being there in person.

We focus on locally sourced, user-generated visual content to show each place as seen through the eyes of its locals. It’s constantly reviewed and rated by our community to keep it relevant and up-to-date.

You’ll find alternative, boutique and eco-friendly accommodation options displayed within the feed and map, allowing you to make bookings based on the area and surroundings, not just the property itself. We source these from various affiliate partner sites, based on quality (e.g. high user rating), authenticity and location.

A lot of lesser-known, off-the-beaten-track locations on earth are also ones facing most socio-economic problems. By enabling the discovery of these destinations, we aim to help spread the travel/tourism concentrations away from main conventional travel hotspots. This will help raise awareness, interest and drive local economies (give jobs etc). We plan to use a portion of the profits derived from each destination to help local communities and relevant issues e.g. cleaning the beaches, etc.

By adding the visual aspect to predominantly text-based information, we help you make better informed decisions and provide a personalised, end-to-end experience when exploring, planning or booking accommodation.

Rough demo at https://lucal.co/explore/Rio-De-Janeiro--Brazil (not yet optimised for mobile, please view on your laptop/desktop)

delphinius81 10 years ago |

This has potential to be a really engaging and useful platform, especially if you can connect with the various partners/affiliates. One of the things that I always try to do when traveling is stay in more local friendly neighborhoods to experience the real life of a place. If you can figure out how to integrate this into VR, all the better. I'd even suggest having a mobile app for once you get to a location. It could dynamically curate content based on things happening that day/time, that season, or similar times in years past (e.g. major yearly festivals).

My biggest concern is about how many pieces need to hit "critical mass" to be successful. You need digital content to attract users, but your model relies on users to provide the digital content.

For example, to cover a new/off-the-path location, you'll need to seed your platform with media. How much media can you scrape from publicly available locations to do this? What incentives would locals have to generate content for the platform for expanding to a new location? Would you pay freelancers or hope for people to upload content for free?

Really cool idea though and something that I could totally see using to plan my next trip!

nthtran 10 years ago | |

Thanks for your comment and questions!

Like you said, one of our use cases is helping people find the right neighbourhood to stay in. Whether it's because they find it safe, close to things they'd like to see, or has the vibe and lifestyle they want to experience.

Your suggestions are interesting and we've had similar thoughts. Hope we'll be able to implement them soon.

Regarding your concerns:

We want Lucal to be a community project so we don't see ourselves paying freelancers directly.

You're right, covering off-the-path locations is definitely a challenge as public media sources for these are limited. We indeed need to incentivise locals to contribute to the platform. One such incentive is publicity for their area and small businesses within it. We hope to work with local businesses and get them to contribute media for their areas, providing content for us and getting their names out at the same time. Partnerships with local tourism boards could help us with this as well.

For more popular destinations it's easier to seed the media so we plan to do some of it ourselves at the start. We can attract users with these initially. Once we have a large enough user base we can start social media campaigns for lesser-known places to get the community to contribute to those.

bestattack 10 years ago |

Wow, this is really engaging. I love scrolling through photos and seeing them on a map, and I could imagine using this to plan my next travel destination.

I think this is very browsable if there is a lot of content, so I suspect your next step would be to somehow get the content from everywhere worth visiting as soon as you can, so that you can become a default destination for anybody planning a trip. How can you get the content?

antonius_lord 10 years ago | |

Hey bestattack thanks! I'm Lucal's other cofounder Anton. Absolutely thats the idea! Its useful for those planning a new trip - by seeing how a particular area in a destination looks like in real-time and through the eyes of those that live there, (giving a local perspective and not just a commercial/tourist one). Also when just wanting to explore the world and find new, remote places and seeing whats happening there and they are all about.

We are aggregating user-generated content from a number of online resources as well as direct uploads from our primary community of photographers and users.

Be sure to check out the demo and let us know what you think, We'd love to know :)

kumarski 10 years ago |

VR is becoming commodotized, framing the problem for VR is the really tough part that requires the hard work.

Similar to the BTC problem. Cool tech, finding applications is tough.....

There's a lot of people trying to do the same thing, what do you understand about these virtual tours and the experience around them that other people(many other people) in this space simply fail to key in on?

antonius_lord 10 years ago | |

Cheers Kumarski, good point totally agree! VR is just one part of our media. It has been looked at as the game-changer in the travel industry, however we have seen that users are interested in seeing realtime visual information, to see how any place looks like at any time as well as the option of VR.

Our focus is on creating and engaging a community in order to have our members review and rate the media to continuously display only what is relevant and updated.

We also try to portray each location through the eyes of its locals, rather than tourist/traveller perspectives, as many others rely on.

Also the visual domain is an extension of the end-to-end planning and booking experience we are working with our early users to achieve, to help make better informed travel and booking decisions, rather than just display visual tours etc

vit05 10 years ago |

What is the difference between Lucal and www.panoramio.com?

nthtran 10 years ago | |

Panoramio has a lot of nice photos but just by using it you can tell that it's outdated and not being actively developed. We want to do more than that: local live streams, videos (drone, vines, etc.) as well as VR with 360° photos and videos.

Our goal is to help you get a feel for any place as it currently is and see what's happening there right now, for example weekly local markets, festivals, annual events, etc. Thus the focus is on live and recent visual content that will stop being displayed after a certain time (possibly 1 month).

A cool thing we can potentially do with this is time travel. You'll be able to see what was happening at any place at any given time on Lucal with a timeline slider.

vit05 10 years ago | | |

Google almost shut down the site to integrate exclusively in Googlemaps.

A lot of people responded, including the founders, and Google decided to keep for some time the service. Maybe you should check the Panoramio communities to see what they miss about.

I used Panoramio a lot when I was backpacking. Are you from Brazil too?