What if planning a trip could feel like the journey itself? By combining AR with a physical map, GatherRoute transforms travel planning from a screen-based task into a shared spatial experience of connection and imagination.
AR prototyping
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system design
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UI/UX
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spatial computing
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Scope
AR Experience Design
Role
UX/UI & Interaction Designer (Team)
Duration
7 weeks
Year
2025
Families often struggle to plan trips collaboratively across generations. Digital tools tend to isolate decision-making instead of creating shared excitement. Gather Route reimagines travel planning as a playful, ritual-like experience using AR glasses and a tangible map, making collective exploration intuitive and emotional.
Planning with family means balancing many perspectives from grandparents to teenagers. It’s often where communication gaps and planning stress appear most clearly. Focusing on a family group highlights how GatherRoute can turn those challenges into opportunities for connection.
Conducted interviews with multi-generational families about how they plan travel.
Observed that time coordination, device gaps, and decision fatigue often cause tension.
Found that families wanted more visual and participatory ways to imagine destinations together.
Planning travel often feels fragmented and individual, rather than shared and inspiring.
Families use different devices, have varying tech familiarity, and rarely visualize travel together in real time.
To turn travel planning into a shared, interactive experience that sparks anticipation and connection.
I explored several possible interaction frameworks from a mobile-only experience to tabletop projection and AR glasses. After testing early prototypes, I found AR provided the most natural shared perspective: everyone could see the same virtual content anchored in the same physical space.
Decision factors:
AR allowed intuitive gestures (circle, check, zoom) for collaboration.
It merged digital discovery with physical interaction, ideal for families gathered around one table.
Created emotional engagement through ritual-like gestures and spatial presence.
The interaction begins when users scan the physical map through their AR glasses. Each family member explores destinations, adds bookmarks, and visualizes routes together in shared space.
They can drag and rearrange locations to build daily itineraries, estimate time and cost, and view the plan as a living overview that everyone can understand at a glance.
The final prototype demonstrates how GatherRoute integrates the full planning experience through AR glasses and physical map. Users can scan travel tickets to start their trip context, add bookmarks for places of interest, browse Airbnb stays, and organize daily routes directly on a physical map. Each step builds a cohesive, visual journey, transforming planning into a shared, spatial story that everyone can see and shape together.
Transformed an isolating process (individual trip planning) into a collaborative experience.
Encouraged cross-generational participation through intuitive AR gestures and shared view.
Demonstrated how AR spatial interfaces can enhance emotional connection and reduce decision fatigue.
Through Gather Route, I learned how designing for shared emotion is as critical as designing for function.
AR provided a way to make planning tactile and social, but also revealed challenges such as gesture calibration, interface accessibility, and comfort across generations.
Next, I plan to expand this project into “ambient AR planning systems”, exploring cross-device collaboration between mobile, tablet, and AR glasses to support hybrid group experiences.
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