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seldom|seen 17 years, 8 months ago.
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New Groundspeak gps game?
I dont know any more about it than that, just curious if anyone else does?
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You need a GPS-enabled PDA to play. I think the general gist is that you download a game to your PDA which has to be written for the area you live in. The game instructs you to do certain things, and when the GPS detects that you’ve walked into certain “hot zones”, it will trigger the next part of the game on the PDA.
I’m sure there’s a bit more to it, but I’m pretty sure you need more than just a GPSr to play.
Dave has it basically correct. Some of the “modules” will be game like, while others are more of a tour guide. The big cache is that it will only be available for PocketPC. There are no plans to make it available for Palm, iPhone, Garmin Nuvi, or any of the other media capable hand helds out there.
As if caching isn’t addictive enough. Now this…..It’s like adding frosting to crack cocaine!!!
The possibilities are mind numbing!!! I can almost visualize armies of techno-geeks swarming over our parks doing battle with hordes of virtual orks.
@Team Deejay wrote:
There are no plans to make it available for Palm, iPhone, Garmin Nuvi, or any of the other media capable hand helds out there.
They just announced that the new Garmin Colorado handhelds will be capable of doing wherigo.
http://www.wherigo.com/garmin/default.aspx
At the bottom of that page it says you can let them know what devices you would like to see whereigo work with and the more requests something gets the more likely there developers might work on it.
I kind of think that Seldom|Seen will be all over this one.
At this point in time this game doesn’t seem to pique my interest. It seems like it should be in some kind of game room. I guess I fail to see a caching relationship here.
What exactly is the object of the game?
@furfool wrote:
At this point in time this game doesn’t seem to pique my interest. It seems like it should be in some kind of game room. I guess I fail to see a caching relationship here.
While all the hows and whats haven’t been worked out yet, I see an adventure where there “could” be containers (like a cache) but with interactive adventures along the way to it. Imagine a haunted woods where ghosts and goblins pop up as you reach certain sections of the trail. That 1 mile hike to the cache just got more interesting.
But there is still much to learn and the “rules” will no doubt change as time goes on.
I guess I’ll have to wait and see how this thing unfolds and developes.
I see this as a chance for nature centers and such, to create self guided tours through their property. You would have the ability to beep the tourist and give them explanations to all the wonder the park has to offer.
These sound like the thoughts that go through people’s minds when we ask them to go geocaching with us for the first time, “So the machine tells you where the box is? What’s the point?”
Until we get a chance to get out and try this, it seems a bit dry. But I’m guessing that once a few of these cartridges are out and about, it will add a little extra flair to our discovery of new places.I spent most of my grey day learning how to build a cartridge. I produced a simple overlay of zones in a city park. http://www.wherigo.com/cartridge/details.aspx?CGUID=c063565e-e5ed-41fb-abd8-81e13928955e
With this new possibility, I may have to get one of those new Garmin’s. I’m still using my yellow eTrex in the field, though; I may go into shock upon first using a Colorado.
I played with the cartridge builder and found it very difficult to create a cartridge. If this is to fly with the masses they will need to do a lot of work to simplify the process of cartridge design….or at the very least create comprehensive tutorials on design…but what they have thus far is an “Alpha version” and is thus a work in progress.
Playing the cartridge in the simulated environment seems fairy easy and works pretty much how one would expect. As you walk around things pop up as you reach real world locations, you are then able to examine real or virtual items, put them into your inventory and “Talk” to virtual people.
I think there is great potential for Wherigo but on CGs side there is still a lot to do to make this whole process user friendly.
To hear them talk about this at Groundspeak, they seem to think that “everyone” can grasp this level of technology. Its pretty clear to me that only programmer types will be able to manage the SDK they put out for this technology. They also seem to think that everyone will rush out to buy a Wherigo compatible GPS, such as the Garmin Colorado.
For what its worth, they don’t seem to be too interested in combining wherigo with geocaching. I think they see this as a) an opportunity to JV with Garmin, and b) an opportunity to build a profit stream by developing “cartridges” for tourism councils, businesses, etc. The “play” aspect of this is more of an easy entry point than a reason for being, that is, get the geocommunity to build play and tour modules to work out the bugs, then start marketing to the “real” customers.
@Team Deejay wrote:
To hear them talk about this at Groundspeak, they seem to think that “everyone” can grasp this level of technology. Its pretty clear to me that only programmer types will be able to manage the SDK they put out for this technology.
For what its worth, they don’t seem to be too interested in combining wherigo with geocaching.
As the builder is set up right now it would be very difficult for most people to create a cartridge. I will figure it out cuz…well cuz I really want to. The project is still in the beginning stages and they are working on making it easier….
As for the combining Wherigo with Geocaching, they do have “plans” to incorporate Wherigo with geocaching (at the very least as a Hybrid variety cache), though that may not happen until the “Phoenix project” gets implemented later in the year.
Here is a link to a discussion about Geocaching/Wherigo where Jeremy makes some comments about the integration:
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