my name is mwd

After over 6 months of working away I’m pleased to finally announce the first release of PlaceWhisper, a fun little app that lets you leave and discover virtual messages in physical locations. You can think of it as geocaching, but without the Tupperware :)

PlaceWhisper is one of those apps I’ve wanted to use for ages, but no one else had written it. After being inspired by things like last years Hide & Seek festival, and the Playful conference (in particular Russell Davies’ talk), I decided I wanted to create something that let people have fun, so I finally decided to go make this app that no one else had got around to.

PlaceWhisper lets you walk around areas and create and find hidden messages, called Whispers, that are tied to a physical location. When you get within a 100 metres you’ll find nearby Whispers show up on the map, but you’re not there yet – you need to get to within a few metres to actually collect the Whisper and reveal its content. Thus PlaceWhisper not only lets you leave messages for strangers or friends in a specific location, it means people have to get up and around to collect your messages! It’s like being a kid again and running around finding hidden messages left by your friends.

You can also link Whispers together to form trails, where Whispers only reveal themselves on the map as you collect the preceding ones on the trail. It’s a fun way to show someone around an area, and also a fun way to make a treasure hunt game in your neighbourhood, or perhaps someone else’s – below is a trail we created in Kensington as part of testing:

That’s PlaceWhisper, and I hope you enjoy it. This is first release, and there’s lots of stuff I still need to add and rough corners to smooth, but the basics of creating and discovering are all there ready to be used. This version had a tight deadline – we used PlaceWhisper to run a game at this year’s Hide & Seek Weekender festival (which I’ll blog about shortly in a separate post to do the event full justice). But despite the rough edges, the app let lots of people have a fun time – and I’ll hope it’ll let others do the same too.

Huge thanks have to go to Laura for her never ending encouragement in getting it this far, the uncounted cups of tea she made for me as I spent quite a bit of my spare time working on this, and her help in testing it – testing location based apps like this involve a lot of walking :) Thanks too to superstar play tester, Dan Wilson, who’s walked many a mile to ensure PlaceWhisper worked, even when it looked a little cloudy:

Thanks also need to go to the hugely talented Andy Field, who did the artwork for PlaceWhisper, and indeed the concept for the new look Digital Flapjack website – Andy got the playful vibe I wanted spot on, I’ve been blown away by everything he’s produced. Finally thanks to Sophie Sampson with whom I collaborated on the Hide & Seek game, who’s given lots of great feedback.

So that’s PlaceWhisper – there’s lots more to come, but this is where it starts :)