Walk into the story.
You're somewhere new — or somewhere you thought you knew. Every corner has a person attached to it, and Story Trail is how you meet them: follow the map, stand where they stood, and let the story open right there.
History isn't behind glass. It's under your feet.
A plaque tells you a building was "constructed circa 1920." Story Trail tells you a wedding happened in its stairwell in 1947. Same building — completely different afternoon.
Find a marker. Start walking. Look up.
Spot a trail
A marker on a fence post, a trailhead sign, or a QR code someone else has already found — or just open the map and see what's nearby.
Follow the path
GPS guidance gets you from waypoint to waypoint, distance and difficulty shown up front — the map stays out of your way until you need it.
Check in and listen
Get within range of a waypoint and its story unlocks — first-person, specific, written like someone telling a friend, not captioning a landmark.
Watch it come alive
Point your phone and see the scene rendered in AR right where you're standing — or drop into VR mode for the full immersive view.
Stand exactly where it happened.
Waypoint stories aren't just text on a screen. Reconstructed scenes and figures appear layered over the real street in front of you through AR, and a full stereoscopic VR mode brings a waypoint to life for anyone with a cheap headset.
- ✓ AR scenes anchored to the exact GPS spot
- ✓ Google Cardboard–compatible VR mode
- ✓ Historical photos, restored and reanimated
Point your camera to see 1942
Chapter 2 of 5
Every trail unlocks like a quest — the same collecting instinct that gets a kid to the next waypoint on their own two feet.
Built for the kid holding the phone
Voice, pacing, and chapter length are tuned for the person actually walking — not the adult reading over their shoulder.
Made to get kids looking up.
Story Trail started as a way to pull kids off a screen at a holiday house — not a travel-history app that happens to tolerate children. Every default is built around a parent and kid discovering a marker together, before either of them has even opened the app.
Solo travellers and history enthusiasts get plenty out of it too — the map, the AR, the research is all real — but a family bored on a Saturday walk is who this was built for first.
Told honestly, even when it's uncomfortable.
Not every waypoint is a delightful surprise. Some of the fullest history in a place predates any plaque on it, and some plaques only tell half the story. Where a trail touches First Nations history, Story Trail names whose Country it is — and doesn't repeat a monument's silence as if it were the whole truth.
Read how we handle difficult history →