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.
Source of the laughing men below as well as some other classics:
Franklin and Gob dramatic zoom
Stains the Crazy Eye Cupcake Dog:
Gary Busey Hand Puppet:
It looks to be a pretty young site and it doesn’t have the best design, but the content is worth the digging around. Not too much material yet, but if things pan out this could be a great resource on the web. There is a notable lack of Tyra though.
I present to you that pinnacle of cinema, that triumph of ingenuity and spirit, that veritable font of brilliance, that eternal joyous spring of je ne sais qoui, that motherfucking goddamn masterpiece, Howard the Duck.
I don’t remember anything about this movie other than that I do remember seeing it, at my grandmother’s house, when I was about five or six years old. Maybe that explains a few things.
Hush now, for Real Talk: Movies In Frames is a pretty cool site. Your favorite movies (and many very interesting-looking ones you’ve never seen) distilled into four meaningful yet mostly spoiler-free, contextless frames. One more, from David Fincher’s Se7en, after the jump.
After reading the David Foster Wallace article on Lost Highway and David Lynch I have to say this is not quite how I imagined him being but that only makes this even creepier. Something about him makes it seem like he would be perfect in Lost.
Alert us to your presence by standing on the bridge, holding the artificial body parts over your head and shouting ‘Kijuju!’. We will be there, watching you, and will approach when you make yourselves known.
Points allocated for each body part – 2 points for arms, 2 points for legs, 3 points for torsos , 5 points for a head. The more body parts you find and bring to us, the more points you get. The player(s) with the most points by 11am win the holiday to Africa.
Ha! I’ve already won. I guess they should have done a better job of hiding those parts around my house.
I could talk about if this is going too far, if this is really going to be a valuable marketing exercise, but instead I’ll just make a joke about being a murderer/ritual dismemberer since I just started watching Dexter and murder’s on the brain.
In times past I have been forced to watch videos of people doing covers of their favorite songs on youtube. It never ended any way other than with me crying and holding my ears shut. I loved the earnestness, but it was just hard to watch. Fortunately, this collection of youtube music videos is not only good – it’s spectacular. (Track 3 stands out)
It’s not a straight music recording – instead, it’s a remix of hundreds of different compositions and tracks people uploaded to youtube, by Kutiman.
And the web design is awesome. This sort of stuff needs to happen more often.
I suppose it was a combination of thinking about all these things, plus finding out how cheap newspapers are to print, that led me and Ben to make thisnewspaperthing. It’s exciting because putting it in the world has clearly made all sorts of people think again about the newspaper format. Cheap paper, cheap printing, can make something beautiful and interesting. It’s a great form factor. Just because it’s attached to struggling business models doesn’t mean it will inevitably disappear.
(The important lesson to learn is that it’s totally okay to rip off other people’s ideas. It’s the only way you’ll ever come up with anything original.) More excellent pictures here! And some very interesting answers from the designer.
But let’s be honest, shall we? Real men don’t need cameras to dance in front of.
I wish I was an MFA at Yale. The different environments on display are so alluring. And I’m just jealous of those dancin’ skills, which seriously improve over the course of these 100 days. A great playlist, too, which is available if you click through the link at the top.
* Digital download of Since 1972, including 3 videos
$15
* CD/DVD double-disc set
* Digital download
$50
* CD/DVD double-disc set
* T-shirt
* “Thank you” phone call from Josh for buying Since 1972. You can tell him what you like about the record that you purchased, or what you thought sucked. Ask whatever you want, like “Is Maynard really THAT weird?” or “Which one of Sting’s mansions has the comfiest beds?” or “Are Devo really suburban robots that monitor reality or just a bunch of dads from Ohio?” or “Why don’t the Vandals play more stuff off the first record?” It’s your 5 minutes to yack it up. Talk about whatever you want.
….
$5,000 (limited edition of 3)
* Signed CD/DVD and digital download
* T-shirt
* Josh writes a song about you and makes it available on iTunes
* Co-direct a video with him for the song about you and throw it up on the YouTubes
* Josh gives you and a friend a private tour of Disneyland
* Get drunk together. If you don’t drink, we can go to my dad’s place and hang out under the “Tuba tree”
* Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam will send you a letter telling you about his favorite song on Since 1972
