Treasuremapper

Treasuremapper allows you to trigger mediafiles on a mobile phone depending on where that phone is in real space. This allows you to create spatial media experiences, often refered to as 'locative' media.

For example, you could create a detective story that requires someone to walk around town to discover clues. Taking a right turn instead of a left could have dire consequences in the story. You could create a romantic walk for valentines day in which you literally walk down memory lane. Treasuremapper was built to allow you to explore these locative possibilities.

The goal of Treasuremapper is to allow a broader group of people to create locative media experiences. Treasuremapper makes it easy to design experiences, compatible phones are cheap to buy, and the software itself is open source.

What do I need?

You need a phone that runs the "Symbian S60" operating system, which means you need a Nokia smartphone. If your phone is in this list you're almost certainly good to go. Currently Treasuremapper needs an external GPS device that can talk to your phone through bluetooth. 

A secondhand Nokia N73 can be bought second hand for about 50 euros/dollars and a bluetooth GPS receiver can be bought for about 30 euros/dollars.

How do I use this?

Using Treasuremapper is a three step proces:

• Create a Treasuremap: Just draw areas on a map, it's easy and fun.
• Install: Place the Treasuremapper software together with the map and the media files on your phone.
• Using: explore the created treasuremap by.. walking around.

What's so nice about Treasuremapper?

It's so nice because:

• Nokia smartphones are easy to find. This keeps using Treasuremapper cheap and accessible to small initiatives.
• It's open source, meaning you can change it to fit your needs, or you can find a nerd to do it for you without too much hassle. It also means it's free!
• It doesn't need mobile internet to work (but if you do have that, you get extra options).
• It should work with most if not all Bluetooth GPS devices. Having a separate GPS receiver allows your phone's battery to last longer.
• This website explains how to set it up.

What are the plans for the future?

Treasuremapper should be a community effort, but there are some directions the NetNiet.org foundation is interested in:

• There are a more and more phones that Treasuremapper could run on. If demand is there, we could make it run on the Maemo or Android platform.
• We want to enable the use of internal GPS. Newer Nokia phones make this a lot easier to access.
• Creating a more integrated online authoring environment would be helpful. It would allow the download of the maps and images to your PC or even directly to your phone through mobile internet.
• Most of all though, we want to start a new project in which we use the new possibilities that HTML5 offers to expand the Treasuremapper platform in new directions.

In the last two cases Treasuremapper would need a phone with mobile internet. Right now one of its strengths is that it doesn't need this costly feature. Treasuremapper, as a platform, could head in both directions.