Wherigo.com - the next generation of Geocaching

[geoparadigm]

This is the next generation of geocaching, integrating multimedia and
gaming, from the people that brought the world geocaching.

From the wherigo website:

About Wherigo
What if you could take video games outdoors?

In late 2001 after running Geocaching.com for over a year, Jeremy
Irish and Elias Alvord came up with an interesting challenge: How
could they take their favorite adventure games and bring them outdoors
with GPS technology?

Wherigo. And Why
If you are familiar with adventure games like Zork, Myst, or the
Secret of Monkey Island you can think of Wherigo as an adventure game
construction set for the real world.

You don't type north or click your mouse to move your character around
a screen. Instead you literally move yourself in the real world and
interact with objects and characters using a handheld interface.
Currently you can participate with a Garmin Colorado or most GPS-
enabled PocketPC devices. The plan is to make the Wherigo Player work
on many other platforms - including mobile phones.

If you aren't familiar with adventure games, the idea is that you can
move around in the real world using GPS and a handheld device to
experience media-rich content relating to your location. The
experience can be a tour guide, an adventure game or anything dreamed
up by an author.

How does it work?
There are two sides to Wherigo: Building and Playing

Building
Using the Wherigo Builder application, Wherigo authors can build
interactive adventure games, tour guides and other innovative
activities for Wherigo players to enjoy outdoors. The Wherigo
experience combines physical and virtual elements, overlaying engaging
story lines and useful information onto a real-world background.

The basic building blocks of Wherigo are zones. Zones are areas on a
map that represent locations in the real world. Zones can be created
to be any shape an author chooses and are usually dependent on the
type of experience the author desires to make and share. For instance,
if an author wants to develop a tour, a zone could be created around a
specific landmark.

Once the author is finished creating the experience, it is uploaded to
the Wherigo site as a self-contained Wherigo file, called a cartridge.
The published file is made available at www.wherigo.com to be
downloaded by players equipped with the Wherigo Player application.

Playing
Using the Wherigo Player application and a GPS-enabled device,
participants can visit physical locations, take and use virtual items,
interact with virtual characters and solve real-world puzzles.

As a player enters and exits a zone using a GPS-enabled device, the
players experience what the author intended for them, including
viewing media, receiving directions or tasks and hearing sounds on the
device. For instance, when a player walks into a zone, a player could
"talk" to a virtual character, "pull" a virtual switch or "give" a
virtual item to a character. As the player continues to move from zone
to zone, an author's fictional story, tour or adventure game can be
experienced using Wherigo.

How and when did you come up with the idea?
Wherigo was conceived during the early days of Geocaching.com as an
alternative experience to finding geocaches in the woods.
Groundspeak's founders had a rich experience in adventure games and
these experiences greatly influenced the evolution of Wherigo.

It took a lot of work to determine the best interface to create a
broad set of experiences - from tour guides to games. It also took
some time for the GPS market to mature enough to have media rich
devices that would work well with the concepts around location. High
sensitivity GPS units like the Garmin Colorado make for a much richer
experience than earlier devices.

Creating Real-World Adventures
Groundspeak's goal is to reintroduce the adventure game genre through
the use of our Wherigo applications so that individuals will be able
to create and play location-based adventures in the real world. Using
the Wherigo tools, locations will become the background for engaging
story lines that authors will use to construct their own location-
specific entertainment, from simple points of interest tour guides to
interactive games.

From a Geocacher's Perspective...
The evolution of geocaching inspired early pioneers to develop "puzzle
caches," or geocaching experiences that contained puzzles to locate
the final container. Sometimes using math, often using multiple
containers and even combination locks to immerse the geocacher into a
new experience.

Place has been an important factor in each unique geocaching
experience. Adding objects, characters and tasks through the Wherigo
toolset now gives geocachers a broader palette to build more engaging
puzzles.

It's also a good excuse to buy a new tech gadget.

More than Just a Game...
Location-based cartridges are not just for those who love adventure
games. The toolset is designed to be open-ended so cartridge builders
can create any number of interesting experiences for a player. Here
are a few general examples:

Walking tour of city sights.
Neighborhood scavenger hunt.
Innovative marketing proposal.
Pub crawl for your friends.
Interactive fictional adventure.
Alternate reality game.
...and a few specific ones:

A Civil War history cartridge with rich media history. Players can
travel throughout the park and reference points of interest defined by
the cartridge builder.
A garden tour that guides the player along a predefined path, pointing
out the different flora and landscape architecture.
A college campus new student orientation cartridge that contains
necessary stops to register with the college, and other points of
interest around the campus.
The ideas for content are endless.

It's our goal to offer these tools for free and see where you can take
it.