Noodle Nodes: An Idea (from 2008)
After 10 years running Geocaching.com we have come up with a lot of fun and quirky ideas that never made it out of design. While going through my old external presentations over the years I came across a gem that I presented to Garmin in January, 2008 that I wanted to share.
Launching Wherigo
January, 2008 was around the time when Garmin announced the Colorado. Before this time, Groundspeak worked with Garmin to launch Wherigo on the new device. The idea was to take geocaching outside the box as a media rich experience, and Garmin was the obvious choice as a first partner. They were the first to recognize geocaching as an important activity for their outdoor devices, being the first to add a geocache "treasure box" icon to their devices. Since then they have often been the first to release features for geocachers, though more recently there has been healthy competition from other GPS manufacturers.
Because Garmin's handhelds weren't connected to the Internet, Wherigo adventures, called "cartridges," are self contained games that can be downloaded and played offline. Once the game is completed the save file can be uploaded back to the web site to prove you completed the cartridge.
Even though the Colorado was missing some basic media features, like animation capabilities and sound (other than system beeps), it did have ANT - a low power wireless feature that intrigued me. It was being used to send geocache data from one Colorado device to another, but it had the capability to do much much more.
Enter the Noodle Network
For the launch of Garmin's new Colorado device, the Groundspeak partners went to CES to support Wherigo and the new geocaching features. During that time we had the fortune to meet up with ANT, the company that was acquired by Garmin to provide short range, low power wireless capabilities. I had a nice chat with one of the employees about the capabilities of ANT and I became really excited about the prospect of using this with Wherigo and geocaching.
Shortly after returning from CES, I developed an idea and presented it to Garmin during a planned visit to Seattle. The concept was ultimately code named "Noodle Nodes."
A Noodle Network would be a flexible, inexpensive wireless network for location-based experiences. Each network would contain Noodle Nodes - Low powered and pre-programmed wireless modules. These Noodle Nodes would communicate with your handheld device to allow you to interact with the information contained within them. It could be as simple as discovering they are nearby, or receiving detailed information for a larger adventure.
With these nodes you could put them in caches to send data back to the device (like "I'm here!") or more detailed information and media through Lua, a scripting language that we use with Wherigo. Because each node has a unique identifier it could link a specific node to a geocache, or to prove that a node works with a particular Wherigo cartridge.
There were various other proposed ideas in gaming, tourism, social networking, and even local positioning. I even shared a conversation with a Microsoft employee who said "if you can offer a way to find a Microsoft conference room with Wherigo, we'd buy a ton of them."
Why This Didn't Happen
Wherigo as a concept is great, but due to it being a beta product it required several patches and updates in order to adapt to the response from the community. As we learned, it became very difficult to deploy new patches for Garmin to roll out, since they release very few patches over the lifetime of the device. It became a problem when we were limited to a new release every couple of months.
(In today's environment you can release a web page several times a day, a new Android application update daily, or an iPhone application update every couple of weeks. I like today's environment!)
We're also not in the hardware business, so we have to rely on our partners to develop a product like this. In the end, Wherigo just wasn't a big enough focus to incorporate this concept. The SDK for ANT was still in beta at the time, so development with ANT was also difficult. And with little support for Wherigo we expected there would be even less support with new concepts like ANT.
Also, in the end, ANT is a proprietary wireless protocol which would have restricted the use of the technology to a small subset of users that own the devices that support it. We felt at the time that it would be a disservice for us to promote one device (and protocol) over another, so it never came to fruition.
I still think there is some life to this project and would love to see this happen in a more open way. If you have some interest in working on this idea, we'd love to work with you.
