Tag: trails

Waterford Festival of Food Unveils Digital Partnership

Waterford Festival of Food has announced an innovative partnership with CultureUnderground.ie, introducing a bespoke, mobile-first digital guide to navigate this year’s extensive festival programme. This exciting collaboration reinforces the festival’s long-standing commitment to sustainability and accessibility, offering attendees a seamless, paperless way to navigate over 100+ events across Dungarvan, West Waterford, and Waterford City directly from their smartphones!

As the 2026 programme expands into Waterford City and deep into the West Waterford countryside, the Culture Underground guide serves as a real-time companion for visitors. Designed to reduce reliance on traditional printed materials, the intuitive platform provides interactive maps, instant schedule updates, and curated discovery features, allowing festival-goers to move effortlessly between high-profile chef collaborations, foraging trails, and the festival’s signature outdoor markets.

The move is a key part of the festival’s environmental strategy, aimed at reducing the event’s physical footprint while ensuring that the 100+ events remain easily navigable for visitors of all ages.

Eunice Power, CEO of Waterford Festival of Food, welcomed the partnership saying “Accessibility and sustainability are the twin pillars of our festival design. As we grow, we want to ensure that navigating the weekend is as enjoyable as the events themselves. Partnering with Culture Underground allows us to bring our values into the palms of our visitors’ hands, making it easier than ever to discover new chefs, follow food trails or family friendly events  and just generally move through the weekend with ease.”

Shane Holohan, Founder of Culture Underground, added: “We’re delighted to collaborate with the Waterford Festival of Food, a flagship event built on community, creativity, and a profound sense of place. Our goal is to make cultural discovery effortless. We are proud to support festival-goers with a digital guide that doesn’t just show them where to go, but helps them immerse themselves in the stories and producers that make this event so unique.”

The digital guide will be available to all visitors via waterfordfestivaloffood.com and through QR codes located at key festival hubs throughout the weekend.

Official Launch of Dublin Discovery Trails AR App Developed by Peel X

Members of the Peel X team were delighted to attend the official launch of Doors into Docklands recently, part of the Dublin Discovery Trails series of mobile app based immersive discovery trails, using innovative Augmented Reality (AR), designed, developed and delivered by Peel X.

Doors into Docklands was co-funded by Dublin City Council and Fáilte Ireland’s Destination Town Investment Scheme and Peel X was brought on board, to help unlock the tourism potential of the Docklands by bringing the area to life using its augmented reality and immersive, digital storytelling.

Jess Wright, Managing Director of Peel X, said: “The team brought together the full range of Peel’s app development services to this project, augmented reality, 3D modelling, animation, historical research, script and copy writing, green screen filming, audio and soundscape development, all interwoven to create stunning digital storytelling of the Dublin Docklands”.

“Merging the old and the new, combining history and technology, visitors are transported back in time. Users can see Guinness barges sailing down the River Liffey, a Crimean Banquet held in the Custom House Quarter (CHQ) and the story of the famine statues. History comes to life along the trail with a 360-degree view of the Custom House fires blazing in 1921, and animated Port workers in the Diving Bell at the bottom of the sea.”

Delighted with the successful launch of Doors into the Docklands, Barry Rogers, Head of Dublin City Council Tourism Unit, said: “As part of the delivery of our Smart Tourism programme we have become very familiar with the market of service providers in the area of digital tours, immersive heritage trails and museum based digital tours and digital visitor experiences in Ireland, the UK and Europe.

“We have consulted the market on these services twice and have developed the best practice guide Toolkit in this area. Having worked with Jessica and her team over the past twelve months, I can say that Peel X is the best supplier of this kind of service that is currently in the market today that I have encountered.”

The App is a first-of-its-kind development for Dublin City Council and further promotes the capital’s position as a leading ‘Smart City’. The app is aimed at locals and visitors who want to know more about the city and experience the history of the Docklands from a new and unique perspective. It’s already creating a stir on the international stage too as Dublin City’s Smart Tourism Programme took the Best Digital & Innovation Award at the Global Tourism Innovation Awards 2022, held in Seville last year.

Walking tour guide, Donal Fallon, whose Three Castle’s Burning podcast grew an army of fans during the pandemic, was invited to road-test the app, he said: “The app lets you see familiar places in new and exciting ways. There are so many different stories in the app, using augmented reality, taking something digital and putting it into the real environment, that’s a brilliant way of seeing things differently. There’s great humour and where there’s a there’s a heaviness to the history, that’s acknowledged too.

“I hope people have many happy wanderings around this part of the Dublin from the Diving Bell to the Custom House, using the app. Well done to everyone involved in making the app, it’s really special. From locals to visitors, I’m sure there’ll be many happy hours on Doors into the Docklands.”