Make this city yours

Imagine opening a map of Linz and seeing… nothing. The whole city is gray.

Now you go for a walk, a run, or a bike ride. As you move through the city, the areas you visit become unlocked and start appearing on your map.

So the goal is simple: explore the city and gradually uncover the whole map.

But we wanted to give people more reasons to explore. Whenever you unlock a new area, we can also show you events happening there — something happening today or something coming up in the future.

And after your activity, you can also see interesting information about the places you visited. For example, which streets you walked through, who they were named after, or what happened there.

For the hackathon, we built a small prototype demonstrating this experience. We connected it to an events database and a database containing street names and their history. Since we don't yet have the live GPS integration, the movement through the city is simulated for the demo.

In the final product, however, the idea would be that you simply start your normal activity. Your phone or wearable — for example, an Apple Watch or Garmin — provides your GPS track, similar to what happens in Strava. We would use that real GPS data to determine which parts of the city you have explored and unlock those areas automatically.

We are starting with Linz, but the concept could work for any city.

The target audience is mainly locals — people who feel like they've already seen everything in their usual area, but actually haven't explored most of their city.

Ultimately, we want to turn something as simple as going for a walk or a run into a game of discovering your own city.