Devoteam Helps Gaiurb Transform Tourist Engagement with Augmented Reality App on AWS

The Portuguese city of Vila Nova de Gaia’s urban planning and housing team—called Gaiurb—wanted to build an immersive tourist app, integrating the WalkinGaia project. After an underwhelming launch, Gaiurb turned to AWS Partner Devoteam to build a front end on Amazon Web Services (AWS) featuring augmented reality (AR) and gamification, and a backend able to cope with seasonal peaks. Devoteam deployed a range of AWS services to handle additional computational capacity and variable traffic flow, while ensuring low latency. Working with Devoteam, Gaiurb’s app session times climbed by 47 percent, location visits rose by 23 percent, and customer satisfaction increased by 157 percent.

Gaiurb is responsible for urban planning and housing for Portugal’s third-largest city, Vila Nova de Gaia. Set on the southern bank of the River Douro, Vila Nova de Gaia is renowned for its port wine cellars, the imposing Luís I Bridge, and its religious heritage. With the WalkinGaia Project, Gaiurb wanted to encourage more people to explore the city’s places of interest—not only the well-known locations but the relatively undiscovered sites, as well.

The objective was two-fold, according to Alexandra Cabral, communication designer at Gaiurb. First, to expose visitors and locals to the “non-traditional hiding places that tourists and citizens don’t know,” and second, to “smooth mobility” across the city. “Our priority is the territory and the cultural environment,” says Cabral.

“We are here for the people. It’s about reducing pressure on all the usual places. Our goal is to promote different and beautiful places.”Unfortunately, its original mobile WalkinGaia app—built for this purpose—failed to attract significant numbers of users. “The app performance was limited by capacity and ended up with lots of static content,” says Ângelo Estrela, IT director at Gaiurb. Gaiurb knew it needed to attract more users—including a younger audience—and that meant introducing a revamped app, one with greater interactivity and gamification.

In May 2021, Gaiurb turned to AWS Partner Devoteam. Instead of recommending an upgrade to WalkinGaia, Devoteam proposed developing a brand-new app that would incorporate elements of augmented reality (AR) as a user explored Vila Nova de Gaia’s historic center. Images would be animated, maps displayed against one of the city’s iconic buildings, and discounts offered on local attractions as tourists pointed their smartphones at interactive billboards located across the city.

The solution, which Devoteam began building in early 2022, needed both a new, immersive front end and a radically different approach to the backend. “If you look at the way tourism works, you have peaks and troughs during the year,” says Vladimiro Luz, alliance manager (AWS) at Devoteam. “So we needed a solution we could stretch and shrink based on the tourist demand. Rather than go with a more traditional data center approach to host the app, we built an architecture that allowed us to create the content without impacting the quality of the service or the user experience.”

Devoteam looked to AWS to provide cloud-based scalability, security, reliability, and agility. To manage visitor peaks and troughs and to support high-performance interactivity, Devoteam deployed a range of AWS services. It used Amazon Aurora, to offer high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), for secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Devoteam also implemented Amazon CloudFront, to securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds, and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) for serverless, fully elastic file storage.

Cortesy: Gaiurb

Gaiurb’s Estrela says the company chose AWS mainly for technical reasons. “The variable demand for this app put stress on our systems,” he says. “AWS delivered scalability and control. We had complete confidence working with its technology.”The COVID-19 pandemic added an extra layer of complication to the project and meant collaboration took place remotely.

This didn’t hinder the working relationship, however. “Working with Devoteam was simple,” says Estrela. “Their team possesses multiple skills, and we always have clear and direct conversations. They showed great flexibility as the project changed and as our scope widened.”

The new version of the app features a series of interactive routes, including ones that celebrate the poets and writers inspired by the city, one that uncovers the hidden features of the narrowest street in Gaia’s historical center, and another that traces the maritime navigators of the River Douro.

Early results proved positive. A soft launch in November 2022 received increased user engagement, compared to the previous version. App registrations, visits to points of interest, and app session times rose 12, 23, and 47 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, customer satisfaction scores increased by 157 percent.

The new app went live in summer 2023, and the Gaiurb team plans to place 50 promotional billboards—complete with interactive QR codes—across the city by the end of the year. Next, the Gaiurb team wants to extend the project beyond the historic center, fulfilling its remit to the entire city and its citizens. This is possible thanks to the flexibility of the new solution. “We built an elastic solution that’s simple to scale,” says Devoteam’s Luz. “This will help Gaiurb in the future with new features and releases.”