Thrillist covered Geoloqi today, highlighting a bunch of fun use cases such as the following:
Drinking: Set up a pub crawl and share your journey with buddies who can see where you’re at on the route at any given moment, and join you before you slip into Amnesia.
Bus Napping: A function called Geonotes lets you do things like mark your stop on a bus route and get a text when you’re a block away, thought if Sandra Bullock is driving, that’s probably the least of your worries.
Pestering: Geonotes also allows you to leave locale-based messages for app-using friends, hopefully along the lines of “Nice haircut, Ross. Even a monkey couldn’t make you cool.”
Socialness: The app also allows third party “layers”, meaning you can do things like automatically check in on foursquare without touching your phone, though obviously double bounces still aren’t allowed.
This week the Geoloqi team attended APPNATION and presented at AppCircus, a global open app showcase. We learned about the conference from Di-Ann Eisnor and had very little time to prepare our presentation for the event.
Lots of Apps!
The competition had a lot of great ideas and it was wonderful to see them. All were successful apps in many different fields. Our two favorites were GitBax, an app that helps you “get back” to those you meet, and OpenSignalMaps, an app for finding mobile signals around town.
The next morning Geoloqi was called to the stage and awarded a $1,500 cash prize on behalf of APPNATION. Geoloqi was also entered into consideration for a presentation at Mobile World Expo in Barcelona, Spain next year.
APPNATION, San Francisco!
APPNATION was a great conference! We learned a great deal and got to meet a ton of amazing people. The presentations were chock full of information and the expo floor companies were very relevant and useful to talk to. We have Di-Ann Eisnor to thank for telling us about the conference, and the conference organizers for putting on such a great event.
Much more to come!
Thanks to everyone who attended the event, helped us to prepare and supported Geoloqi in general. If you’d like to get news more quickly follow Geoloqi on Twitter!
Aaron Parecki created a visualization of the territory captured by each team during gameplay. Below is a visualization of the GPS trails of the players during the games. Each dot represents a snapshot of the position of each player taken every 1-10 seconds.
Some of the players experienced interesting events, such as seeing a marching band with Stanford students dressed as pine trees play on campus. Another player found something even more interesting:
Final Game Results
Again, red completely won over blue! It was an epic battle filled with kids and bikes and many points.
You can see a replay of the games in the video below!
Want to bring a game to your school or company? Contact us at mapattack at geoloqi dot com or here and we’ll be glad to help you out! You can also follow @playmapattack on Twitter for the latest games and news! We’ll be bringing it to more campuses and cities starting in June 2011.
Giant Thanks!
Again, giant thanks to Aaron Parecki and Kyle Drake for development and Patrick Arlt for design. Enormous thanks to Reid Beels and Audrey Eschright for helping keep the server stable during Friday’s game! Making a game like this has been a dream of mine since WhereCamp Portland 2008. It’s great to see it come to life!
This morning a bunch of us at WhereCamp headed out to play MapAttack, a game based on the Geoloqi platform. Players subscribed to the MapAttack layer in the Geoloqi app and were assigned to a red or blue team.
The game quickly progressed as people rushed out to collect dots. Some, riding on bikes, grabbed points faster than others. Others, like @paigesaez, aimed for large points, finding and capturing 50 point dots before anyone else.
Mobile App
Here’s what the MapAttack game looked like on the phone. The leaderboard updated in real time, and everyone’s locations and movements could be seen. The fierce battle between red and blue teams progressed over time.
A Rush to the Finish
Red dominated in the lead over Blue through most of the game.
One of the players who got most of the red team’s points on the map told us a story of how one of the points was stuck in the middle of a construction site. He went up the construction worked and asked him if he could carry the phone into the site and hold it there until the point was received. That led to an interesting discussion on real-life apps and games between him and the worker. Had he not been playing the game, he would not have had the conversation or even talked to the worker.
@mpanighetti and @aaronpk went out to draw the word Where on a part of the Stanford University campus. They cranked up the tracker and ran around in the shape of the word.
There have been a bunch of pieces of GPS art created with the Geoloqi app. If you have one, send it to us at art at geoloqi dot com! We’ll put it up in a gallery in the future! Thanks a bunch!
Thanks to everyone who played and worked on the app. We can’t wait to improve it and bring it to more people! You can keep up on future games by following @playmapattack.
MapAttack is a real-time location-based GPS game running on the @geoloqi platform. Coming to a city near you.
Behind MapAttack is Geoloqi’s powerful location-messaging platform and our new gaming platform that can scale up to handle hundreds of thousands of parallel users.
Why MapAttack?
So you can turn the real world into a game, of course! To get to run around while doing awesome things and have fun! The feeling while playing a real-life game is one of the best things on earth. It’s not common, but it’s becoming an increasingly awesome possibility with mobile technology. We hope millions of these games occur and that we can make more of them possible. We’re always inspired by Jane McGonigal and AreaCode and we’d like to increase our ability to bring more people into real-world gaming.
We did the first beta test of MapAttack at the Park Blocks in downtown Portland, Oregon today. As you can see, the map was filled with dots of various values, all of which were quickly eaten:
Thanks so much to Pat Arlt for the excellent design and CSS for this gamemap. The map intelligently shrinks and grows based on browser-window size. Check it out!
Some of the MapAttack players!
Last minute bug fixing…
Aaron Parecki and Kyle Drake furiously worked on a last-minute OAuth2 issue before everyone could join. This lightning-fast park bench programming is brought to you by tethered Android phones!
The experience of playing MapAttack was a unique one. Similar to playing Pac Manhattan at WhereCamp Portland in 2008, the Park Blocks and Pearl District became something more than just a series of streets. When the game was running we were all motivated to explore and gather points by a very different drive than simply walking down the street. It was a completely wonderful and intense feeling.
How a real-life game feels can’t be fully described unless you have played a real-time alternate reality game. There’s something behind these types of experiences, and that’s why it’s been so exciting to build this type of game.
Video
Here’s a short video of @caseorganic explaining the game. Thanks to Sam Churchill of dailywireless.org for taking the video on our first day of testing!
What Next? MapAttack at WhereCamp and Colombia!
After we speak at Where2.0 next week, we’ll be bringing the game to Stanford University where we’ll be bringing MapAttack to WhereCamp. Our first international remote game will be in Medellín, Colombia later this summer.
There’s going to be a lot more!
You can follow MapAttack on Twitter for updates and if you’d like to ask us questions about how to use the platform to make your own games. We’ll have a game-editor and game system set up after we get back from Stanford! See you soon!
Thanks a ton!
Giant enormous thanks go to Aaron Parecki, Kyle Drake and Pat Arlt for making this game come to life. Want MapAttack in your city? Let us know below!
Thrillist covered Geoloqi today, highlighting a bunch of fun use cases such as the following:
