We celebrate November 17 with Festival svobody, an app and augmented reality

November 17 is coming, which means a lot of celebration of our thirty years old democracy.

And we are very happy, that we can contribute to it with our event app for the Festival svobody.

👉Festival svobody app for Android

👉Festival svobody app for iOS

The Díky, že můžem collective and the entire team that organizes the Festival svobody is very interesting bunch of young people, NGOs and students. They have set themselves a difficult but noble goal: to remind the crucial moments of our history, encourage civic engagement, organize concerts, parades, discussions, happenings and other events throughout the country.

Although this time it was definitely not a profitable project, we were very happy to participate in the festival.

But back to our Festival svobody event app.

Its building block is augmented reality, which is actually why the event application was created in the first place. Lukáš Černý, chairman of the Díky, že můžem group, saw what our gadget named SYNEVISION can do in practice and he thought it would be a great enrichment of this year's Festival svobody program. One thing led to another and we started programming the application.

SYNEVISION or augmented reality in action

Everything started with an exhibition of works of art from UMPRUM, AVU a FAMU, where the students portrayed what 30 years of freedom means to them. You can already see the winning works in the streets of Prague. This had a great success (augmented reality in each app evokes great WOW effect and highly engages the users) and we were asked to help other subjects with augmented reality, and that also happened. But first, check out the video from the exibition.

But making things move is not only about graphics, we can also play real videos.

We used this feature in the Fragments of the Revolution exhibition for Post Bellum - one of the Festival svobody subjects, where you can watch Václav Havel's speeches or historical moments from November 89 through augmented reality.

And that's not all… The Fragments of the revolution are located in high schools and colleges and have educational effect - our SYNEVISION shows historical moments in an unconventional form, adds a new dimension to the posters and also inspires pupils and students to explore the posters (and to see how everything works and play all the content).

Check out how it looked during the breaks in Prague schools thanks to SYNEVISION.

We also made other poster, CLVs, leaflets and promo materials move. This was also used by Nerudný fest and his 30 years of freedom in art.

Our app can do much more

Although augmented reality is the pillar and the reason for the Festival svobody application, our work can do much more.

• Show you clearly all the Freedom Festival events - you can easily add them to your own schedule.
• We played a lot with the so-called Geofencing when we put together November Places for Charles University. If you allow the app to use geolocation, every time you get close to a location important for the revolution, the app will give you a notification about important things that happened there.
• For the parade we use a GPS locator - you can get information about where the parade is currently located in real time.

What you can think of at the beginning and what we had to solve on the fly ..

• For example, if we want to get the most out of the content and graphics on one poster and add multiple videos to the same space, they can start playing at the same time. And with sound. User gets multiple audio tracks playing at once and may not be happy :)
• Or it was necessary to make sure that the videos you watch were not unnecessarily held in the phone's memory and discharging the device.

We also had to cope with the technological limitations of various Android devices and Android compatibility for using augmented reality, to be prepared for the strain of 200,000 downloads…

But we were able to manage everything and gained a lot of experience, so we look forward to engage SYNEVISION in the next AppParade. You can find a little teaser below:

It make sense

As SYNETECH, we are proud that we can engage in public affairs and in celebrating 30 years of freedom. An interesting experience was also the cooperation with so many subjects that cooperate on the Festival svobody.

It is a group of enthusiasts for whom the project is their life - they don't care about working hours and just do what makes sense to them - from morning to night. They wanted to give us any information important for the app at that current moment, no matter if it was in the evening or even a weekend morning or holiday… But we don't complain about this - actually, we are glad for this enthusiasm.

Our CEO Vratislav Zima often says that applications should make sense, and here we felt it with every line of code. On top of that, we found a lot of new information about November 17th.

If our app contributes at least by a fraction to various activities of the Festival svobody, then we are happy. If it helps people to navigate in November's celebration and enables them to experience that AR thing mentioned so often, then we can't be but satisfied.

Thanks that we can!

See you on November 17 at Národní třída.

Your SYNETECH

Text us if you are interested in SYNEVISION and we can create next project together.

We will publish more information soon.