U-tour narrates the street you're on — landmark by landmark, streaming in ahead of you and dropping away behind. Start it, pocket your phone, and run.
Audio guides expect you to stand still. U-tour is built the other way round: it reads your direction of travel and works the street ahead.
A forward cone, sized to your pace, watches for what you're about to pass. The faster you move, the further it reaches — so each story starts early and finishes as the landmark arrives.
Every landmark gets a story written for listening, spoken in a real voice. Dial the depth from a single line to a deep dive, and the pacing from back-to-back to widely spaced.
Direction comes from the way you actually travel — not from a compass in a pocket. What you've passed drops out of the tour, and stays on the map.
Every demo drives the real engine — the same heading math, the same narration, only the movement is simulated. Pick one in the app and hear exactly what a run there sounds like.
Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Embankment — at a full run, with the story keeping pace with your stride.
Tour Saint-Jacques, the Hôtel de Ville, the Pompidou a street north — something worth a sentence every twenty metres.
The Vittoriano, Trajan's Forum, the Roman Forum, the Colosseum — each ruin worth three or four paragraphs.
Nelson's Column and Charing Cross at a walking pace — the middle of the tuning space.
Coit Tower, Pioneer Park and the climb up Telegraph Hill, taken at a training pace.
The HSBC lions, the Bank of China Tower, Hong Kong Park — threaded through the footbridge network.
The Promenade, Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan skyline — what the app sounds like when it isn't trying to keep up with you at all.
The demos are just the canned ones. Point U-tour down any street with a story and it fetches, writes and speaks as you go.
The Deep Dive demo mid-run: landmarks queueing up ahead, the heading read from movement, and the story of Parliament Square arriving right as it comes into view.
Captured in the iOS Simulator · narration is spoken aloud in the appHow a running tour guide reads direction, paces its stories and decides what to say next — written up as we build it.
A phone in a pocket knows which way the phone is facing. It does not know which way you are going. Here is how U-tour works out direction, and why the compass is the fallback rather than the source.
3 min readRead the post →A fixed trigger radius is tuned for one speed and wrong at every other. U-tour measures the lookahead in seconds instead, so the story finishes as the landmark arrives whether you are walking or sprinting.
2 min readRead the post →Over the life of U-tour the landmark queue picked up four clever ways to choose what to narrate next. Each produced the same complaint. The queue is now ordered by distance and not much else.
3 min readRead the post →U-tour is heading to TestFlight — bring your favourite running route and a pair of headphones.
Join the TestFlight Invites opening soon.