Apply HN: Lucal – Discover the world as a local through visual media and VR

Like you said, one of our use cases is helping people find the right neighbourhood to stay in. Whether it's because they find it safe, close to things they'd like to see, or has the vibe and lifestyle they want to experience.

Your suggestions are interesting and we've had similar thoughts. Hope we'll be able to implement them soon.

Regarding your concerns:

We want Lucal to be a community project so we don't see ourselves paying freelancers directly.

You're right, covering off-the-path locations is definitely a challenge as public media sources for these are limited. We indeed need to incentivise locals to contribute to the platform. One such incentive is publicity for their area and small businesses within it. We hope to work with local businesses and get them to contribute media for their areas, providing content for us and getting their names out at the same time. Partnerships with local tourism boards could help us with this as well.

For more popular destinations it's easier to seed the media so we plan to do some of it ourselves at the start. We can attract users with these initially. Once we have a large enough user base we can start social media campaigns for lesser-known places to get the community to contribute to those.

We are aggregating user-generated content from a number of online resources as well as direct uploads from our primary community of photographers and users.

Be sure to check out the demo and let us know what you think, We'd love to know :)

Our focus is on creating and engaging a community in order to have our members review and rate the media to continuously display only what is relevant and updated.

We also try to portray each location through the eyes of its locals, rather than tourist/traveller perspectives, as many others rely on.

Also the visual domain is an extension of the end-to-end planning and booking experience we are working with our early users to achieve, to help make better informed travel and booking decisions, rather than just display visual tours etc

Our goal is to help you get a feel for any place as it currently is and see what's happening there right now, for example weekly local markets, festivals, annual events, etc. Thus the focus is on live and recent visual content that will stop being displayed after a certain time (possibly 1 month).

A cool thing we can potentially do with this is time travel. You'll be able to see what was happening at any place at any given time on Lucal with a timeline slider.