Title	TRIP IN THE DARK
Brand	VLADIMIR VASKEVICH
Product/Service	CITY TOURS
Category	C01. Digital & Interactive Design
Entrant	VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA
Idea Creation	VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA
Media Placement	VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA
PR	VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA
Production	VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA

Name	Company	Position
Andrey Gubaydullin	Voskhod	Creative Director
Dmitry Maslakov	Voskhod	Digital Creative Director
Anna Maslyakova	Voskhod	Digital Art Director
Vasily Tsykin	Voskhod	Technical Director
Liliya Zagidullina	Voskhod	Digital Designer
Mikhail Kokorin	Voskhod	Sound Engineer

Background

Vladimir Vaskevich – an entrepreneur and couch – has created a unique project called “Trip in the dark”. He conducts excursions around the city, and they are unusual in both content and format, as Vladimir is a visually impaired guide. A website was created to promote Vladimir’s work and introduce inclusive experiences within a city environment. The goal of the website designed for Vladimir and his project was to attract people’s attention to the problem of conscious existence, to develop cognitive and intuitive skills and stir up the human sensibility towards the world around us.

Describe the creative idea (40% of vote)

What is necessary is a drastic review of how people consume visual information. The creative idea included launching a new industry of inclusive experiences. A website was created to connect the visually impaired guide who conducts city tours and users willing to get a unique experience. Moreover, as the city is not perfectly adapted for people with special needs, the city tour has been supposed to attract the attention of the residents to the problems of city environment accessibility.

Describe the execution (40% of vote)

The website reflects the idea: the more you walk, the more information you acquire from the outer world. Like people with visual impairment, users dive into the world of sounds which we feel to the outmost only through physical activities. Every real life step of a user brings up an action on the mobile website. And besides that, website interaction can be done with voice. The website was developed by using Cinema 4d, canvas, sound mapping, Google Voice to speech service API,THREE.js, vue.js, svg-animation, Google maps API, browsers resources — motion and orientation, voice recording.

List the results (20% of vote)

The project was launched in Yekaterinburg and faced huge popularity among residents of the city. Since that time, it has been featured in over 120 publications. During the first 10 days after the launch, trips with Vladimir were booked until May 2020. The number of orders to book a trip with a visually impaired guide spiked by 1800%. Vladimir Vaskevich has been getting dozens of orders every day, so there is no date for the website and the trips themselves to finish. Moreover, a new idea came up: to expand Trips in the dark to the territory of museums. Vladimir Vaskevich’s project is unparalleled in terms of the amount of information it gives on how people with visual impairment live in Yekaterinburg. Along with that, Trips in the dark bring people closer to their inner feelings, such as intuition, hearing, and kinesthetic perception.