TRIP IN THE DARK

TitleTRIP IN THE DARK
BrandVLADIMIR VASKEVICH
Product/ServiceCITY TOURS
Category I04. Social Behaviour
Entrant VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA
Idea Creation VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA
Media Placement VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA
PR VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA
Production VOSKHOD Ekaterinburg, RUSSIA
Credits
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 strategy

The website created for the project lets users dive into the world woven from sounds, touches, tastes and trust. Through an exquisite merging of art and technology, people’s past experience zeroes out and new one starts to form. A user encounters new ways of interaction with the Internet environment: through voice commands, audio marks and 3D orientation. The more users explore the website, the brighter is the darkness around them. Street noise, humming, water drops, car horn become the new guide. The city sounds can be added to the cart thus compiling an individual route for the future trip. The reviews section tells about the enlightenment that the Trip gave to its guests.

Describe the execution

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

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.

Please tell us about the social behaviour that inspired the work

On the one hand, there is a problem: there is a huge surplus of visual information. On the other hand, there are people who cannot see. There is an enourmous potential for both group to enrich each other's lives and experiences. In our city, there is lack of public spaces for visually impaired people. But they find a way to interact with the city's environment and share their challenges with us.