Gigaputt & “When All the World’s a Staged Game”

Make the world your golf course!:

With the flick of a button Gigaputt transforms your neighborhood into an exciting 3-hole mini-golf course, complete with popping manholes, treacherous fire hydrants, and giant coins. With each new game Gigaputt creates a course starting from where you stand and gives you the option to either walk the course like the pros using your iPhone’s GPS, or play from the comfort of your living room.

Gigaputt uses intuitive gesture-based controls that allow you to swing your iPhone like a real golf club and send the ball sailing over your neighborhood…

Gigaputt [video]

A recent New York Times article chronicles not only the development of Gigaputt but a variety of playful uses of the location-aware technology and accelerometers in smartphones. You may already be well aware of location-based games and location-based social media, but this article highlights a variety of fun examples you may have never heard of. There’s simply too many interesting things in the article to effectively excerpt here.

From When All the World’s a Staged Game:

With these new tools, designers are building mystical realms, orienteering courses, immersive fictions, and parallel universes in a way that may or may not have anything to do with the world around them. Mr. Trefry, for instance, is weighing the option of using a bar, a figurative watering hole, as a literal hole for his figurative golf course.

Kevin Slavin, a co-founder of another game company, Area/Code, started in early 2005, explained the allure, “It gives you something about a place that is legible to you but invisible to most everyone else. There’s a kind of beauty to that.”

(via Bernie DeKoven)