iOS icon

The Vision

Interplace

Vision

According to studies, the average American doesn't even leave North America on their vacations. In fact, surveys show that about 64% of Americans have not taken a trip outside the U.S. in the last five years. The willingness or curiosity to travel to new locations around the world is very small compared to America's global contribution.

Our partner wanted to motivate Americans to travel more by developing a digital platform that is all about the travel experience.

Every American should be able to see the experiences of others on an interactive map and gather inspiration/ideas to plan a travel vacation outside of America with friends or family. In return, they should also be able to share their experience on the platform for others to see, comment on and like.

An Instagram that focuses only on travel and should become an exclusive travel community. By travelers for travelers.

Sharing experiences, networking with other travelers and planning, doing and sharing cool trips together.

Everyone fills out their profile, like a bucket list, and can see their progress in discovering the world and put it on display.

If you are interested in travel and how innovative IT Solutions are built in social media, then take 5 minutes now and dive with us into the story of Interplace - the world's first interactive travel community.

Duration : 12+ Months

Collaboration : Long-Term Partnership

app image
Our Solution

Our Solution

A Travel App From Travellers for Travellers

Our Solution

As the budget was limited, we opted for the development of an exclusive iOS app (especially as Apple products are mainly used in America) and a limited feature set in order to receive feedback as quickly as possible and thus allow the product to grow in a user-oriented manner.

We developed a small feature set for this purpose:
Users can access a 2D map to see what interesting explorations users have made in their network. If content has been shared by other users, it is displayed there and can be viewed. All posts can also be viewed in a classic feed view.

With the help of a beautiful Explore function, users can find content from the community for interesting travel destinations. They can network with other travelers and exchange information using a chat function.

Each user can share their experiences by being guided through an innovative post creation process and tagging their experiences to locations, events, friends. Through a comment and like function, each user can interact with these experiences and make new travel friends.

Each user's profile shows a 2D map with all the destinations the user has visited as well as a categorized view to see which continents, countries, etc. have been visited.

A landing page and the corresponding admin panel for the administration of the platform were also developed.

telescope_mas

Key Components

Key Features
registration

User profile management

registration

Travel album post management

registration

Explore feature

registration

Live-Feed and 2D-Map view

registration

Profile management

registration

Chat integration

registration

Push notifications

registration

API development and server

registration

Admin panel

Tech Stack

Tech

Native App Development IOS (Swift)

Back-end

Native App Development is the creation of software programs that run on specific devices and platforms. You can build beautiful native apps for target devices-smartphones.

Back-end framework, Logic, Server

Back-end

Nodejs was used for the backend. The NodeJS open-source program provides Cross-Platform access, real-time communications, and a single programming language. We used MongoDB as our database. With such a small footprint, it can control and coordinate deeply embedded apps in huge warehouses with a great amount of data. We developed the API logic to retrieve data for favors, updates in the clan or profile. Besides that we used socket for real-time chat experience between users.

Social Login

Social

Social Login is a single sign-on for end users. To eliminate the need to manually create a new account, we have integrated Google, Apple, and Facebook logins that use the existing credentials of the social network provider and create a new account for the RMN Events user.

Chat

Social

For the interactive course, the video call, we integrated the Zoom Video SDK and not only customized the layout, but also implemented the group splitting functionalities.

Google maps

Social

With Google Maps APIs integrations, we have been able to show the events through an easy 2D map interface.

Stripe Payment Gateway

Social

Stripe provides software and APIs for processing online payments: Accept payments, send payouts with various payment methods like credit card, bank transfer, Google & Apple Pay and much more. In RMN Events we implemented the ability to pay via credit card, so users can purchase event specific products, season passes for their athletes or register athletes to an event as guest.

Firebase Push Notifications (FCM)

Social

The integration with Firebase Notifications (FCM) is a free service that enables user notifications for Android and iOS devices. Firebase allows the product automatically and the console administrators to easily send notifications across platforms without having to write own implementations.

How Vitec Archived The Project Goal?

Client goal

We have discussed the vision with our partner and brainstormed the technical implementation. To combine social aspects with a digital marketplace is not easy. Through a series of ideation sessions, we were able to jointly plan valuable features and create a product roadmap to first and further versions.

services category

The IT Solution consists of several products. To ensure consistency and branding from the beginning, we first built a UI Design System and maintained it in Figma. Then we created the first screens to finalize the direction and thus the first product design.

services category

By using the Laravel framework and MVC design pattern for the website and back-end, as well as the the Flutter framework and MVVM design patterns, we were able to develop the project quickly and fix minor procedural bugs directly through an iterative review process with our partner.

services category

Quality is always our top priority, but time must also be considered. For smaller IT Solutions we reduce the testing to the most necessary to ensure all core functions. The tests went successfully and the smaller edge-case bugs were tolerated in the beginning.

services category

We set up the server and deployed the back-end, database and website. Both apps were published and with that the solutions were accessible and ready to be used by everyone. We were endlessly happy to receive the first positive feedback from our users and our partner.

services category

Main Functionalities

Functionalities
Check-Out

User Authentication

Check-Out

Interplace offers registration with social logins such as Google, Apple or Facebook, or classically via email and password. To make registration secure for emails, an OTP workflow has been integrated. After registration, the user is guided through an onboarding to fill in relevant profile information. The user is then guided through a short interactive onboarding session to better understand the app's various functions.

Check-Out

Profile Management

Check-Out

Within the app, the user has the option of editing all information or deleting the account. But not only that, the user has various overviews of all their travels. They can see all their travels in a 2D map or filtered by different categories such as continents, countries, wonders of the world or in a timeline. They can see all the content on which they have been tagged by other travelers.

They can block users and view and manage their followers or the users they follow.

The visibility of the profile can also be managed there. The app offers a private profile to prevent other users who are not in your network from accessing your content.

Check-Out

Album Post Management

Check-Out

A primary part of the platform are the album posts. This allows users to digitize their beautiful journey and share it with everyone in their private community, Interplace community or just for themselves.

These posts are not comparable to Instagram, but offer important functions for travelers. When uploading videos and pictures, automatic tags are generated and assigned to the data. For example, the location, special points of interest or users. The user can then add further tags and thus give each of their content a story so that other users can understand more about these images and an album post can go on a tour through different places in a country and show specifically what can be found where. Through small texts, you can share even more information depending on the location.

Other users can find this content as images or as an entire post and view, comment on and like it.

The aim is to share travel experiences in a way that is only geared towards sharing travel experiences and not everything like in Instagram or TikTok.

Check-Out

Feed Feature

Check-Out

Each user has their own feed to view the content of users from their network. Two views are offered for this purpose. In the first, the user sees the travels posted by others in a classic list view. There they can see at a glance which cities have been visited on this travel and how long it lasted. The other view uses a beautiful 2D map. This map shows with clustered PINs where users from your network have been and you can see and filter all pictures of a friend for a specific location on a map with one click.

You can also search for locations and friends to find their content directly.

Check-Out

Explore Feature

Check-Out

Another central component of the IT solution is to provide users with inspiration. A cool exploration function allows users to authentically explore countries, cities and sights around the world through the content of other users.

They can find the greatest travelers and network with them to plan trips together.

Each location shows you which users from your network have already been there and what content they have posted.

Biggest challenge

Biggest challenge and our journey of overcoming

Biggest challenge

The biggest challenge in Interplace was in the development of the unique travel post creation process. Yes, implementing a video or image uploading feature is easy but the difficulty was deeper. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to tag their uploaded images to provide better content to the community.

The biggest difficulty was to automatically assign suitable tags to uploaded images. It is particularly difficult to do this generically for the whole world. This was only possible through the use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). To save costs, we used an iOS framework that could automatically identify cities and points of interest based on GPS data. To be able to create tags ourselves, we then decided to use Google Places APIs (Overview  |  Places API  |  Google for Developers).

However, there were sometimes difficulties with the two interfaces to ensure that the same names were used for all languages. We still fine-tune the whole thing today when new places are tagged around the world. Another issue was localization. In order for all cities to be understandable for everyone, we had to ensure in the background that all tags for cities had a reference to English. This all sounds easier than it actually is, but it was only through a lot of trial and error that we were able to build a stable solution.

Most special moment in
our journey

journey

The most special experience in this project was definitely the development of the album creation process. Many small unique functionalities had to be integrated intuitively and functionally in order to create and edit travel albums quickly and effectively as a user. Due to the large number of different tags and high number of images and videos per post, this was a real challenge for the design as well as the technical performance implementation.We look forward to further developing and of course improving this function over the next releases with the help of users. After all, this function is one of the most essential of our project and our community of travelers.

If you would also like to join us on a journey and write another success story together, then simply get in touch with us.

We look forward to discovering a place of possibilities in the digital world with you and creating something unique there.

journey

Leave A Reply

Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Marc

Marc Roset, CEO at Vitec, loves working with people around the world to develop trend-setting and innovative IT concepts. His working methodology can be summarized as follows: "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships."

Other Interesting 360° Success Stories

Portfolio

Every successful project has its own success story. We aim, we work, we deliver and let our next projects tell a new story. We have a lot more in our closets. Please let us know if there is anything you need and we will bring it out for you. Together, let's create another one.

Mobile App

Mobile App

Kix Ride

Barcode
Barcod

Mobile App

Kix Ride

Barcode

Do you know how much time you spend driving your kids around? Parents are spending more and more time driving ...

Barcode
Barcode
Mobile App

Mobile App

Weguide

Barcode
Barcod

Mobile App

Weguide

Barcode

Navigating new cities has always been a mix of excitement and challenge, especially when seeking authentic exp...

Barcode
Barcode
Mobile App

Mobile App

Planningcharts

Barcode
Barcod

Mobile App

Planningcharts

Barcode

The goal of this partnership was to develop a new, modern mobile app to replace the existing, outdated app.

Barcode
Barcode