“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but having new eyes.” ~ Marcel Proust
The richness of any travel experience depends on so many elements, the people you meet, the places you see, and the background knowledge that makes it all fall into place somehow. That is where Visgo comes in, with an app that immerses you in the history in a unique and entertaining way. We caught up with founder Mohamed Ahmed to get the full story.
CWM: How did you come up with the idea and how does it work?
MA: Growing up in Aswan, which is a rich city when it comes to heritage and history, most of us take this heritage for granted as you literally pass by it every day, but luckily, I was given the opportunity to study heritage management at Universität zu Köln and developed a new appreciation.
When I was back in Aswan, I took a group of foreign friends to explore the temple of Philae but I found out that the existing ways to explore new places like tour-guides or guide books were not always interesting. I saw a real need for a new, convenient and fun way for travelers to explore these places and learn their stories. The Visgo App was born, to provide travelers with immersive location-based audio guides.
What does it offer in terms of information to travelers that they can’t find elsewhere?
What’s different about Visgo is that we focus on the aspect of experiencing. We try not just to give the information about a place but to story tell, we develop a unique story for each place, use professional voice actors and tailored sound effects to bring these places back to life as if the walls could speak. So, taking a Visgo audio guide would feel like just walking around in a movie.
What languages will the audios be available in?
Currently, all our audio guides are available in English but we are adding more languages like Arabic and German soon.
How can people participate?
Soon we are launching Visgo Studio which is a platform where all kinds of content creators can create their location-based audio guides and generate income while doing it.
So, if you are a food blogger for example you could use Visgo Studio and create a food audio tour for your city and then publish it on Visgo App for people to buy and experience it.
What has been covered so far?
Now available on Visgo App are the pyramids of Giza, Cairo Citadel, Al Muezz Street, and Coptic Cairo, and we are adding 7 more audio guides all over Egypt in September.
What areas of Egypt do you plan to cover?
We are planning not just to cover famous monuments but also the other aspects that few speak of, like in our audio guide for Zamalek district or downtown Cairo and even the intangible aspects of culture with food audio tours and even shopping audio walks. We have plans to cover the whole MENA region as there are a lot of places across the region that we could produce audio guides for.
And with Visgo Studio for content creators the possibilities of what we can cover are endless.
