Guidance and translation, in your field of view.
NAVLINGO is an AR navigation and real-time translation system for airports, transit hubs and cities. It overlays directional guidance, translated signage, live speech captions and contextual point-of-interest info directly into the traveller’s view, so they never have to look down at a phone in a crowded, unfamiliar space. It spans three surfaces: AR glasses as the primary interface, a companion mobile app, and a smartwatch for discreet alerts.
Travellers get lost in complex terminals and blocked by language barriers, while phone navigation forces heads-down walking.
An AR system overlaying wayfinding, live sign & speech translation and airport info directly in the field of view.
~90% of testers rated the AR navigation intuitive and effective across three connected surfaces.
Modern travel is stressful, disorienting and full of language barriers.
Travellers routinely struggle inside large terminals, with inaccessible signage and confusing airport systems. Existing phone navigation forces users to look down, disorienting and unsafe in crowded spaces.
Multi-level, complex airport hubs are hard to navigate.
Foreign signs, menus and spoken announcements are unreadable.
Little audio / visual support for low vision or low tech literacy.
Outdoor and indoor glare make phone screens hard to read.
Last-minute gate changes and lost luggage cause anxiety.
…use AR and real-time translation to create a seamless, accessible travel experience for all travellers, regardless of language, tech literacy or physical impairment?
No headset was built for accessible travel.
We benchmarked the leading AR/VR platforms. Each nails part of the spatial experience, but none combines real-time travel navigation, live translation and full accessibility, the gap NAVLINGO targets.
| Capability | Apple Vision Pro | Meta Quest Pro | HoloLens 2 | NAVLINGO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time indoor / outdoor navigation | Limited | Limited | Limited | ✓ |
| Live sign translation (eye-gaze) | ✓ | |||
| Airport flow, boarding pass & gate sync | ✓ | |||
| Full WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility | Partial | Partial | Partial | ✓ |
| Eye-gaze interaction | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| IoT baggage tracking (RFID / beacon) | ✓ | |||
| Consumer travel focus | ✓ |
Key technical challenges
Consumer AR glasses offer only 40-50° FOV. Mitigated with waveguide-optics research and gaze-adaptive UI scaling.
Targeted 10,000+ nits (Lumus / DIGILENS modules) so overlays stay legible in daylight.
Depth-focused, multifocal optical design to reduce eye strain over long sessions.
Three travellers, three very different needs.
Built from research into who struggles most with travel, an older low-vision traveller, a tech-savvy solo explorer, and a parent managing a family. Each was storyboarded through a real journey.
Visiting his daughter in Japan, poor eyesight and Japanese signage make Fukuoka airport daunting.
Solo traveller exploring Paris, wants hands-free navigation while carrying luggage.
Travelling with family, juggling kids, baggage and gate announcements.
From a broad concept to a mapped system.
We began by mapping the whole opportunity space, AR/VR for translation and navigation, and the IoT data that would feed it, before narrowing to the features worth building. Swipe through the ideation and mind maps.
Information architecture & flows
We mapped how IoT, navigation, translation and airport services connect across the AR, mobile and watch surfaces, then defined the core journeys.
- Scan boarding pass (AR camera / NFC)
- Retrieve flight, gate & luggage details
- AR path projected onto the floor
- Gate-change & ETA pop-ups
- Arrive, session auto-completes
- Activate via eye-gaze dwell or voice
- Source language auto-detected (OCR)
- AR overlay replaces foreign signage
- Announcements become live captions
- Set a destination by voice or search
- GPS + AR path overlaid on the street
- POI & landmarks surfaced by gaze
- Live re-routing and ETA updates
- AI depth sensors measure baggage
- RFID checked against airline limits
- AR arrows to self-service drop-off
- Live tracking pushed to smartwatch
- Scan the multi-level car park
- AR highlights free bays by floor
- Guided route to the chosen bay
- Bay saved for the return trip
From hand-drawn sketches to spatial concepts
Navigation, translation and supporting features were sketched by hand before any pixels, swipe through the ideation.
A calm, accessible system built for the eye.
A dark, low-vividness scheme minimises glare and keeps AR objects legible; every colour passes WCAG AA and was checked for colour-blindness.
Eye-gaze interaction principles
A fourth principle, dynamic scale, grows targets as the user moves away and shrinks them up close, keeping everything comfortably tappable at any distance.
Accessibility, WCAG 2.1 AA
High-fidelity interfaces
Five spatial interfaces, navigation & translation, live sign translation, baggage drop-off, smart parking and outdoor directions. Swipe to explore.
Validated with Google Cardboard + Draft XR.
We prototyped in Figma with Draft XR and tested on Google Cardboard with 10 users (aged 18-45, 50% with prior AR familiarity), running heuristic evaluation, scenario testing and a post-test survey and interview.
Which features impressed testers most
Survey results
The full post-test survey, overall satisfaction, navigation, translation accuracy, feature preference and travel frequency.
Key findings
90% of participants rated the AR navigation flow intuitive and effective, the strongest-performing feature.
In bright sunlight, translated text needed darker backing panels to stay legible.
Two participants needed manual re-calibration; gaze alignment must be more forgiving out of the box.
Dense signage caused overlapping text, solved by filtering translation targets by gaze dwell.
Text under 14px was hard to read at distance; a 16px minimum spatial-text rule was established.
What worked, and what we’d change.
- Accessibility-first design improved spatial UI clarity for everyone, not just low-vision users
- Hands-free eye-gaze control proved ideal for travellers carrying luggage
- Google Cardboard + Draft XR enabled rapid validation without multi-thousand-pound hardware
- Test with native speakers across 10+ languages
- Deploy on HoloLens 2 / Apple Vision Pro for true optical pass-through testing
- Add adaptive contrast backing driven by ambient-light sensors
See NAVLINGO in motion.
A short walkthrough of the AR navigation and real-time translation experience.
Selected sources.
View the full case study on Behance ↗- Apple (2024). Apple Vision Pro. apple.com/apple-vision-pro.
- Apple. Designing for visionOS, Human Interface Guidelines. developer.apple.com.
- Meta. Meta Quest Pro. meta.com/quest/quest-pro.
- Microsoft (2019). Microsoft HoloLens, Mixed Reality Technology for Business.
- Behnam, S. & Budiu, R. (2022). The Usability of Augmented Reality. Nielsen Norman Group.
- Riegler, A., Riener, A. & Holzmann, C. (2021). Augmented Reality for Future Mobility: Insights from a Literature Review and HCI Workshop. i-com, 20(3), 295-318.
- Medeiros, D., McGill, M., Ng, A., et al. (2022). From Shielding to Avoidance: Passenger AR and the Layout of Virtual Displays. IEEE TVCG, 28(11), 3640-3650.
- Abu Doush, I., Alshatnawi, S., Al-Tamimi, A.-K., et al. (2016). ISAB: Integrated Indoor Navigation System for the Blind. Interacting with Computers.
- Samha, A. K., Alghamdi, N., Albader, H., et al. (2020). Applied Internet of Things in Saudi Arabia Airports. ICENCO 2020.
- Chung, J., Pagnini, F. & Langer, E. (2016). Mindful navigation for pedestrians: Improving engagement with augmented reality. Technology in Society, 45, 29-33.