Time travel is possible, thanks to the Ladysmith Chamber.
A few years ago the Ladysmith Chamber developed it’s new Ladysmith Heritage Walk app. The software will take the user on interactive guided walking tours of the town’s past. The refined app features the background on the many heritage buildings and artifacts visitors can find here.
The original app, the Heritage Walk, ran into issues itself with technology. The Chamber moved away from the first app because it kept going down every time there was an update to an android or an Apple phone. Roberta Bowman said
“So it was going to cost us a lot of money to have to keep getting the program updated," said Robert Bowman, the chamber's executive director. "The board decided to move away from that program.... We've created our own app.”
When finished the new app will be on the Ladysmith Tourism website.
“Visitors will be able to to access it through a QR code or just by going onto our website and linking to it,” Bowman said.
The new one references everything that was on the original app.
“We have also decided to add another layer to it, we're going to bring in an indigenous focus to it. One that will highlight indigenous artifacts around the area and to include those on the tour as well. We've got a few more photos to collect from the archives and that we hope to have done by tourism season.”
“Now these two projects that we've just talked about,” Bowman said, “they're very tourist oriented and handled under Tourism Ladysmith.”
She sees tourism as part of the economic development side of the Chamber's mandate.
"Even though these two projects will be living on the tourism website, anybody will be able to see them," Bowman said. "The idea is that we would like to put QR codes on all of the artifacts where anybody can start the tour anywhere in town, locals, visitors, whomever, and the tour will take them through all of the artifacts. So if a visitor comes after hours in the evening and the chamber is closed they can still do the tour, so it's visitor experience.”
