Immersive 3D hotel shopping experience
According to a 2019 Oracle report, 80% of innovative project ideas never see the light of day. The reasons being:
28% of those surveyed cite ongoing inertia and resistance to change
One quarter says lack of process is hampering their innovation efforts (26%), a lack of vision (27%) and a lack of commitment from business (23%) are major barriers to innovation
Key factors preventing new products, services, and customer experiences from reaching the market include not having the technology to enable execution/delivery, having the innovation team too separated from core business and poor execution
Yet, 86% of companies experiencing strong to significant growth are investing in innovation.
I believe this project is one of those projects. Although it didn’t make it past the pitch, I still feel it was innovative for the time and could have significantly improved customer retention and engagement and set Orbitz apart from other online travel sites.
Background
My Manager and our Creative Director approached me about a product idea our Director of Product wanted to pitch to the CEO and needed a designer to concept something we could incorporate into our lodging shopping path.
Sam, our Director of Product, was walking by our CEO's office one morning when Barney called him into his office to show him a 3D mouse he had purchased. Sam noticed how much he enjoyed using the mouse and exploring Google Earth. Sam was inspired and felt a rush of innovation. He didn't know what that innovative product would be but needed someone to research and concept an idea he could present to Barney.
I gladly accepted the challenge. At the time, we rarely had a chance to work on innovative projects at Orbitz, creating a concept from an inspired yet vague observation, and seeing it through conception to the presentation pitch was an exciting opportunity for me.
Goals
This project aims to research, explore, and execute an innovative approach to shopping and booking hotels within the Orbitz family of brands using existing and future-leading technologies such as Google Earth 3D.
Present the findings and explorations to the Lodging Director with interim reviews from my manager and creative director.
Deadline
There was no deadline for this project, but there was a desire to have as much information available and explorations completed within a reasonable time frame of one month to two months.
Challenges
No other online travel site had done anything similar, so a competitive analysis was out of the question
Google Earth, at the time, required too much computer processor power and constantly would cause computers to freeze or crash
Google Earth’s 3D environment seemed very rudimentary and pixelated.
Not all users have a 3D mouse, so how can we still give them an immersive experience using a traditional mouse or trackpad, yet insure the product allowed 3D mouse integration?
Could we use 3D mapping API to integrate our content and create an experience that was easy to use, useful, and engaging?
Process
Research
I began researching geospatial technologies and companies that were providing mapping APIs and interfaces.
Google
Mapquest
Rand McNally
Development Seed
Mapbox
C3 Technologies ( a startup company in Sweden)
Only one company other than Google was doing 3D mapping at the time. C3 Technologies was a new startup and had only just begun creating 3D maps of major European cities using high-rez satellite images. I felt that we could benefit from a partnership with them. A few years later, Apple acquired them, and the technology became part of the Maps software.
An example of the 3D rendering of Stockholm produced by C3 Technologies
During the research phase, I also stumbled upon an article about a few art lovers within Google who thought it would be great to create interior “Street Views” of museums to showcase their love of all things creative. It was a new technology at the time, and I considered it in the explorations. I also stumbled upon a company called Micello, who was doing interior mappings of hotel rooms.
Opportunities for Orbitz
With the research I collected, I believed we could offer users a completely immersive experience in hotel shopping. An experience like they have never experienced before. We could leverage several of the technologies uncovered in my research and create something unique and innovative.
I also suggested we partner with some companies such as C3 Technologies and Micello to aid them in providing content and use their technologies to power a new immersive experience.
Screenshots of the concept
I presented these final screenshots to the stakeholder and the product team, and everyone loved the concept and were excited about the potential this could have on users understanding unfamiliar destinations and seeing the actual inside of a hotel before arriving at it.
City Travel Guides
The City Travel Guide pages offered the perfect opportunity to provide users with experience to explore the city and search for hotels, points of interest, and activities using an inline widget for cities where we could enable the functionality.
The inline 3D shopping widget
Users who navigated to the City Travel Guide pages would have an opportunity to interact with a search widget for 3D enabled locations.
Zooming to selected hotel
If a user selected a hotel in the sponsored dropdown list, the camera would pan and zoom to the hotel.
Points of interest
If users chose a point of interest from the menu, the camera would zoom and pan to the location selection; the label would have a link to find out more information about the POI.
Attractions & Services
Attractions and services would have the same functionality as POI. It would have a link where users could find out more information and book the attraction and service
Hotel property details page
The hotel property details page seemed like the perfect place to offer the user the Google “Street View” of the hotel's internal spaces. Using a menu at the bottom of the widget, the user could explore various property elements.
Hotel Details Page
We could use Google Earth and Google’s interior “Street view” to supply the property level experience.
Interior “Street view”
If the hotel had an interior street view available, we could provide a small map of the rooms or areas they could explore using the technology.
Outcome
Orbitz never prioritized the project. Because it was a secret project at the time, my biggest regret was not being allowed to engage with developers to understand how we could use our content and data to create the widgets and service. The secrecy also prevented me from estimating the amount of effort it would take and the cost of partnering with a mapping company to use their API and services to build it.
Not seeing the product make it past the pitch was disheartening, but I was okay with that. I am still okay with that. Nothing is a failure, but everything is an opportunity. I enjoyed the experience working on the project. I learned to explore an innovative idea and spend time doing the necessary research and understand the technologies that would have made it possible, and for that, I am grateful.