TourVista: AI-Powered Travel Guide & Real-Time Landmark Scanner
Turned an early-stage travel concept into a high-performance cross-platform AI travel assistant that triggers contextual audio guides and itinerary suggestions based on real-time GPS location.
The Engineering Challenge
Real-time GPS tracking combined with continuous LLM queries caused severe battery drain and 2-4 second response latency in initial prototypes.
Travelers in remote destinations frequently lose 4G/5G mobile connectivity, causing standard cloud-dependent travel guides to completely break.
Complex map rendering overlaid with dynamic landmark pins resulted in UI thread lag and frame drops during fast map panning.
What I Built & Delivered
Engineered a streaming LLM pipeline utilizing Server-Sent Events (SSE) that displays contextual landmark narrations word-by-word with sub-500ms initial response.
Designed an offline-first geospatial caching layer in SQLite that pre-downloads regional maps, audio clips, and travel tips when Wi-Fi is detected.
Built a custom background location throttling algorithm that conserves up to 35% battery life by dynamically adjusting GPS polling frequency based on user movement speed.
Integrated Google Maps custom vector tile styling with RepaintBoundary optimization for smooth 60fps/120fps map interactions.
Architectural Highlights
Clean MVVM + Riverpod State Management
Strict layer separation between Presentation, Domain (Use Cases), and Data (Repositories) ensuring zero UI-business logic coupling.
Streaming SSE Proxy via Cloud Functions
Secure serverless proxy that shields OpenAI secret keys, adds system prompt guardrails, and pipes real-time streaming tokens to the client.
Multi-Tier Audio Caching Engine
Background isolate responsible for caching text-to-speech audio streams into local encrypted device storage for instant playback.
Engineering & Business Results
40% reduction in perceived AI response latency using streaming SSE text tokens.
99.9% crash-free sessions across 10,000+ travel itinerary generations.
Full offline functionality enabled across 150+ tourist landmarks with zero connectivity.
Approved and launched on both Apple App Store and Google Play Store in under 4 weeks.
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