There are a large number of smart phone applications (apps) available for
health and fitness. Many of these use the GPS within modern smart phones to
track a participant’s movement as they run, cycle or swim as part of their exercise
routine. We're proposing to give the users of these apps the chance to measure
their performance against wild animals by using animal movement data collected by conservation organisations. Imagine finishing a run and finding out
that you've completed 5km faster than a wildebeest and were just short of the
time set by a wolf. Would that motivate you to push onwards to your next
training milestone? What if you could try to match the daily travel distance of
an elephant in Kenya for a month or you and a group of friends could try to clock up as
many miles whilst cycling as a cuckoo does when it migrates back to the UK from its
wintering grounds in West Africa? How about a marathon training program based on the performance of a top animal athlete? These are just a few of the ideas we are going to be working with as we develop the proposal for an app that will literally let a user Race the Wild.
Research on the use of computer games by conservation
organisations in 2011 showed that games have considerable potential to
build support for conservation initiatives and to reconnect people and nature
but that potential isn't being met because of a lack of existing conservation
games and poor communication between conservation organisations and the
computer games industry. The Race The Wild project will explore these two
barriers by attempting to design a game and pitch it to the computer games
industry. Our game concept combines GPS based exercise apps with species
tracking data, allowing people to ‘race’ against wild animals around
the world. You can follow our progress as we attempt to turn this concept into
a reality through our development blog. Where will we get
species tracking data from; what types of data will the project need; how do
end users feel about our idea and will we convince conservation organisations
that this is an idea they can benefit from? Our project timeline runs until the
31st of August and until then I'll be blogging on the development of our
specific game and also on the overarching project development process so that
others who follow in our footsteps can learn from our successes, failures and
observations.