I’m standing at the Virupaksha Temple entrance, 7:30 AM, headphones in, phone in my pocket. A sassy 16th-century poet named Tenali is explaining why the gopuram’s shadow appears upside-down inside the temple.
This app didn’t exist before my trip. I built it — and kept iterating on it — as I explored. On this phone. While walking through these ruins. The whole experience was quite delightful.
This article is written with the help of an AI translating my voice notes into cogent prose. The highlighted bits are manual additions made by me to hopefully add more depth.
Rewind: Why I Needed This
I went to Hampi recently. Partly to run my first ever 5k, partly to explore a place I’d wanted to visit for years. The run was fantastic. (Highly recommend GoHeritageRun.)
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What surprised me was how hard it was to actually understand Hampi while being there.
Not facts. Not dates. Context. Ideally delivered by an enthusiastic, well-informed guide who's really just having a great time with you.
The Friction I Didn’t Expect
Hampi is one of the most historically dense places in India. Everywhere you walk, there’s something significant — ruins, temples, boulders, inscriptions.
And yet, as a visitor on the ground, you’re largely on your own.
I typically travel with a loose plan, preferring to discover a place on-site through online research, local interactions, and building a mental map. Hampi was different.
What was available
- Scattered online articles, often shallow or repetitive
- An app — DigiTour by the Archaeological Survey of India. A virtual tour with click-by-click navigation, similar to Google Street View, with integrated audio buttons for pre-recorded tracks. — UGH!
- Why would I be wanting to look at a screen when the real thing is in front of me :/
- Non intuitive interactivity of a pre-AI era
- I can only deduce the app is for people to explore the locations from the comfort of their homes.
- QR codes at monuments that linked to one-page briefs — informative, but lifeless./) eg: Royal Enclosure area
- Google’s Talking Tours, which required navigating a virtual interface rather than staying present in the physical space.
- No Airbnb experiences, no TripAdvisor walking/cycling tours (at least not one adequately reviewed as one would expect for a place like Hampi), only a government list of tour guides. (of which I tried reaching out to and quoted an enormous rate.)
Either none of this worked while walking around, or was too expensive.
I didn’t want to stare at a screen or jump between tabs. I wanted to be in the place, and have something guide me as I moved.
What I Actually Wanted
Simple:
- I’m walking
- I look at something / click a picture
- I hear a story — why this matters, what happened here, how it connects
Not a lecture. Not a brochure. A voice. Something narratorial. Something alive.
So I Built It — While Exploring, On My Phone
Using Google AI Studio on my phone browser, I decided to see how far I could push it.
I started with two versions:
- One using Gemini 3.0 Pro - link
- Another using Gemini 3.0 Flash - link
Highly recommend this approach: When building something from scratch, explain the intention. Not features, not technical design — the problem and your POV on what a good solution might look like.
Here’s mine:
I’m visiting Hampi, I’m unable to find any do-it-yourself walking or other tours. I want to build a deeply interactive, minimally screen-watching app that narrates the history, with humour, idioms, local folklore etc. Think through and imagine what a great experience should look like.
Feed this to AI Studio, generate a few versions. Let the AI choose features, fonts, aesthetics.
Both worked, but had wildly different starting points. I felt for this particular example, the version Pro landed on felt better (usually Flash is fantastic for UX). The aesthetics, the information architecture, surprisingly, the voice — the pacing, the sass, and the overall experience were simply more natural. This was the one I picked to build out.
As I walked around Hampi, I used the app — and kept improving it on the fly, just by stating intent.
Create a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ style audio experience where user choices (made via simple voice commands or button presses) influence the narrative.
When I was walking and using this, many a time, it would veer off my trail — how can I make it such that the app does not do that? We have the actual location of the user and I guess the user can always tell to course correct.
Notice friction → tweak UX
Notice confusion → add 2-way conversation with the guide
Notice awkward narration → adjust the prompt — Funnily enough, the first voice it picked was a heavily accented woman... comically 90s US TV show like heavily accented. Which on objection, chose a sassy male 16th century poet named Tenali.
All from my phone.
What Didn’t Work
Battery. Constant audio generation, GPS, and screen-on drained my phone fast. I was rationing narrations by mid-afternoon.
Pronunciation. Tenali confidently mispronounced half the temple names. “Virupaksha” came out differently each time. Hampi locals would not have been impressed.
AI Studio’s auto-editing. This was the real frustration. I’d get the narration behavior exactly how I wanted it — the right pacing, the right personality. Then I’d ask for a small UI change, and AI Studio would rewrite the internal prompts, destroying the voice I’d spent an hour tuning.
Lesson learned: Always keep versions of your internal prompts saved somewhere. AI Studio will rewrite them without warning. Copy them out before making changes.
The app is rough. These aren’t solved problems. But they were workable enough to actually use it for two days of exploration.
What I Ended Up With
A web app with:
- Historical facts grounded in Google search results.
- Audio narration with a genuinely enthusiastic poet-guide, appropriately named Tenali. (Sometimes even dual-voice narration with a narrator describing Tenali’s movements.)
- Ability to take a picture of actual ruins using the camera to have it identify and narrate.
- Adventure mode with guided choices for a somewhat guided exploration.
- Location-based automatic triggers for narration.
- Recently visited locations stored in local storage.
Tastefully and thematically designed
The Voice
Experience it here: https://ai.studio/apps/drive/1jmtDU3e4uCa6y29lT4p2GrvEeEALBp4a?fullscreenApplet=true
Sample Narrations
1. The Ancient Pinhole Camera
Aahhh…my friend, it seems the wonder of the inverted shadow has truly captivated your imagination. And who can blame you? It is indeed a marvel, a testament to the ingenuity of our ancestors. We just witnessed it, remember? That upside-down reflection of the mighty Gopuram, a secret camera obscura built into the very fabric of the temple. It’s a sight worth savouring, truly. But as fascinating as it is, there are still many other whispers and wonders within the Virupaksha’s ancient walls, and indeed throughout Hampi. So now that your mind has been delightfully inverted by the spectacle — shall we?
2. The Fractal Patterns — Virupaksha Temple
My keen-eyed friend, you noticed. Excellent. The fractal patterns are truly a subtle yet profound detail in the grandeur of the Virupaksha temple. Tenali gestures towards the intricate carvings on the gateway, tracing patterns in the air with his finger. See how the design repeats but on a smaller scale within itself?
These aren’t just random decorations, they are deliberate fractal patterns. Imagine a triangle, then within that triangle, smaller identical triangles, and within those, even smaller ones, repeating endlessly. This isn’t merely aesthetic. It reflects an ancient understanding of geometry and infinity, a way of representing the universe’s own self-similar nature within the very stones of the temple.
The architects of Vijayanagara, my friend, were not just builders. They were philosophers in stone. They used these triangular shapes to divide and repeat, creating a sense of natural growth and complexity, much like the patterns you see in nature itself, in leaves, mountains, or even clouds. Truly magnificent, isn’t it?
The Virupaksha Temple holds many secrets, both grand and minute. Now, having delved deeper into the temple’s intelligent design, where does your heart lead you next?
3. The Ugra Narasimha
A wise choice, my friend, to face the fiercest protector, indeed. Follow Tenali, but tread carefully, for the power emanating from this colossus can still be felt in the very stones. Tenali leads you through ancient pathways, past thorny bushes and sun-baked rocks, until a massive silhouette rises against the sky.
Behold, the Ugra Narasimha. Is it not a sight to humble even the grandest emperors? This, my friend, is the largest statue in all of Hampi, carved from a single gargantuan boulder. Feel the sheer scale of it, the raw power frozen in stone.
Look closely, and you’ll see he sits upon the coils of a magnificent seven-headed snake, Shesha himself, offering divine protection. Now, lend me your ear, for a tragic tale accompanies this grandeur. Originally, the goddess Lakshmi, Narasimha’s consort, sat upon his lap, a symbol of prosperity and divine balance.
But alas, the ravages of time and conflict have claimed her. She is now missing, a poignant reminder of what once was. Yet even in her absence, the statue’s majesty remains undimmed, a testament to the artisans who breathed life into stone. So, my friend, having witnessed the fierce protector, where does your curiosity pull you? Shall we delve into more architectural wonders or uncover another secret of this fallen empire?
The Point
This wasn’t a startup idea. It wasn’t market research.
It was a response. Travel exposed the problem. AI lowered the cost of acting on it.
Total cost: ~₹100 (Google AI Studio API usage over two days).
That’s the part worth sitting with. Not “AI is impressive” — we know that. But: the barrier between noticing a problem and shipping a working solution is now absurdly low.
I’m sharing this publicly because maybe it solves someone else’s Hampi trip. Maybe someone forks it for Angkor Wat or Petra or their hometown heritage site. The app is rough. It's incomplete. And that's fine.
What mattered was the loop: Experience → Build → Use → Improve
That loop took two days and cost less than a cup of coffee. That’s new.