Still following? Here’s how it works.

Every time you ride a train or visit any location, your personal Ekibo learns and grows from the experience. 

Ekibo automatically generates a diary of all your train rides and visits to venues. Your Ekibo learns and grows with you. Every venue you visit contributes to specific attribute of your growth. Not only are Ekibo’s tastes based on your activity, but his physical appearance reflects it as well. Visiting the gym a lot? Your Ekibo’s arms will get stronger. Spend a lot of time in class? Your Ekibo’s brain will expand before your eyes. The places you frequent and love determine your Ekibo’s completely unique evolution.

The character design of your personal Ekibo is almost entirely unique themselves. There are six “base” character designs, seven attribute categories, and four levels for each attribute. What’s more, the colorway of your Ekibo is determined by your most frequented train line. All this adds up to over 300,000 unique character instances!

Ekibo will also chat to you about various topics, show you some fascinating places in the area and head out on the town with you. 

If you need a recommendation, you use a chat based UI (built with natural language processing and Tensorflow) to ask your Ekibo for a good place to go based on your tastes. Your Ekibo culls recommendations from the other Ekibo users who actually live and work at the local train station, so you can compare what locals think with global opinion.

Sometimes, Ekibo gets a travel bug when another Ekibo tells him of a far off place you’d like. He’ll offer a few hints about the destination, mark the nearest station on the map, and tell you how many points it would take to get there. It’s up to you to guide him on his journey. But the reward is great. Help your Ekibo get to his destination and he’ll uncover that secret spot. It could be a delicious restaurant, a relaxing park, a ninja museum, or a local festival—whatever he is into. He’ll take selfies at his destination, and even bring you back an omiyage (souvenir).

Users can even interact with one another via their Ekibo. Let’s say you send your Ekibo to a train station all the way on the other side of Tokyo. Ask him to take a selfie and the system will locate the other users nearest that station and request a photo. Said user will take a photograph where they are with your Ekibo superimposed (using ARKit) and send it back to you—its like your Ekibo just visited on your behalf! 

People like to wax inspirational about how “life is journey,” but we all know the lowdown: life is really a commute, back and forth between the same old things. But thanks to Ekibo, the curry that you ate for lunch today, the gym that you sometimes drag yourself to, and the office that you see way too much of are all reflected in your character’s growth. 

My Ekibo is super stoic from the long office hours, has an ample beard from my charismatic bar hopping, and is currently way out in Kyūshū, where I’ve never actually been. He’s discovered this crazy bit of infrastructure called the Tsūjunkyō, which is like half bridge and half fountain, made entirely out of stone. 
 

Ekibo is currently an iOS app for train commuters in Japan. We’ve designed and written code suites for generating the maps, parsing train systems, and reliably detecting users’ rides. We are currently working on adding foreign train systems to the app, so that your Ekibo can ride the Paris and Shanghai Metros. It's been a massive effort, but a very rewarding one. Ekibo was named Apple's 2017 App of the Year!

Ekibo is the collaboration of many brilliant individual talents:

Matt Fargo is Co-founder and Head of Development
Chris Nyffeler is Co-founder and Head of Design
Digitimimini is the Server Architect
Kimikai Yaegashi is the Character Designer
Kamiya Keisuke is the Copywriter (Japanese)
Ito Gabin consulted on Game Design
Takasaki Yusuke is Manages PR

You can visit Ekibo on the Web, Twitter, Facebook, or in the App Store.