Race you!

As a kid, I used to love to race people during recess.  In spite of my awesome speed, whenever we played “Top Gun” – our favorite racing game – I was always the cargo plane. Children can be so cruel in their clique politics.

But anyway, my unappreciated awesomeness as a kid is an issue for another post. I’m talking about racing. There is something very exhilarating about such a direct sort of competition that doesn’t require any rules, any equipment, nothing except two people and a destination.  First one there wins.

But grown-ups don’t race.  Why is this?  Is it because it’s seen as childish?  Does that sort of weirdly direct personal competition freak people out? Americans today generally just aren’t that athletic, but when they are it’s usually in the context of an organized sport or a row of ellipticals at the gym.  This makes me sort of sad.

Granted, there are huge road races – we just had one in Atlanta last month.  But these are huge organized events with sponsors and pre-determined routes, registration fees and strict regulations. What I’m wistful for is that impromptu “hey, I’ll race you to the car” or “I bet I can beat you to the other side of the block”.  It’s dumb, it’s fun, and what’s wrong with that?

I think what’s wrong with this idea is that it’s too simple.  We want to go, “why?” or “and then what?”  So to this end, I’m thinking we should make it more complicated and structure it into more of a game.  I got this idea after signing up for FourSquare a few days ago and sort of falling in love. (I’m the mayor of the Equitable building starbucks! Free coffee pls.)

You’ll remember the post on augmented reality a while back featuring the video of the NY subway stations AR app on the iPhone 3gS.  It pulled waypoint information from google maps to overlay it on your camera screen along with estimated distance.  And it looked amazing.

Well, it’s extremely easy to add waypoints into google maps.  So why not make a race app? Here’s how it would work. You can either set a destination on the fly in the wild or set up a route online.  Then get to your starting point and hit go – and you’ll get your target destination overlaid on the display as well as estimated distance and estimated time of arrival, calculated by tracking how fast the GPS has you moving.  Better, it could even track the location of other players so you could “see” their location even outside of your field of vision. 

This is more attuned to a sprawling back-and-forth city-wide race than a simple point-a to point-b sprint.  But doesn’t it sound fun?  There are certainly some issues you’d need to work out.  Whipping out your phone and glancing at the screen while running is probably a pretty good way to drop it, or crack your skull against a lamppost. It might be better suited to a team-based game in cars, with a navigator and a driver—although that sort of removes the active, physical element to it which was the whole point. But these are little details.

I think there’s a lot of opportunities out there for augmented reality apps to provide some useful, entertaining service.  It’s not just for marketers! Although after a race, if the winner got a coupon for a local cafe or a free week pass to a gym… well, I think it could be monetized pretty intelligently. Hopefully we’ll see more apps like this in the future … and fewer giant floating red bull cans.  And even if AR doesn’t take off… well, you can still just get a friend and race them down the block the old-fashioned way.

Is there anything you’d like to see added? Any features you think would make this cooler? Or do you think this is a retarded idea that would never work? Say it loud + proud in the comments.