What About Wherigo? Where Did It Go?
In early 2010, Groundspeak introduced a new geocache type: the Wherigo cache. What is a Wherigo? Well, here’s the way Groundspeak originally described it:
Wherigo is a free interactive, location-based experience on your GPSr. You can interact with characters, manipulate items, accomplish tasks set before you, and answer questions. The Wherigo Player, which provides these experiences, is a small program installed onto Wherigo-capable GPS-equipped devices (we’ll cover devices in another section).
The experiences you have playing Wherigo differ greatly. You could be on a walking tour in an historic section of town, with Wherigo point out places of interest, providing a history lesson along the way. Next time, Wherigo could have you running errands for characters–and rushing back to give little Suzy that ice cream cone before it melts! And later on, you could play the part of a detective, visiting real world locations to examine the evidence, hidden like a geocache, for yourself–and, when you’re ready, try to apprehend the suspect. As you can see, the experiences you can have with Wherigo are varied and entertaining! – Taken from this forum post on GC.com
The idea behind Wherigo was being able to create virtual stories or adventures using a location aware device such as a GPS or mobile phone. As stated above, you could interact with these virtual characters or objects based on where you actually were in the real world. WiG adventures could be done with or without involvement with geocaching. For WiG geocaches, you would go through the WiG itself and find a physical geocache at the end. Usually the WiG would either provide you the coordinates of the final, or bring you to an area and tell you where the cache should be located. It seemed like a pretty unique way to create a location based, real-world adventure.
The problem was that WiG struggled from there very beginning because of a series of problems.
Hardware compatibility
At the time of it’s launch, WiG would only play on two GPS units and one mobile phone: Garmin Oregon, Garmin Colorado and Windows Mobile. This effectively limited the use of the WiG cartridges to a very small subset of the geocaching population. At the time, not many people had purchased an Oregon or Colorado. Windows Mobile was by far nowhere near the most popular mobile platform and it never became that. As time passed, the Colorado was discontinued and eventually Garmin removed WiG support from all of their new devices. Eventually, WiG players became available for the Blackberry, iPhone, and Android platforms but by that time, the interest in WiG had waned.
To add further insult to injury, the compatibility of a cartridge was not guaranteed across platforms. Many cartridges would crash inexplicably on the Oregon GPS units. Many mobile phone apps would work on some cartridges but not others. It seemed that a good standard did not exist to help keep the platform stable on any piece of hardware.
Stability
As previously mentioned, depending on the hardware, the cartridges could be very unstable causing crashes or simply unpredictable behavior. Sometimes cartridges would simply not work or they would display the wrong panels in the wrong order. This caused a great deal of frustration from the players because they were excited to try it out, only to be disappointed due to the lack of stability. This combined with the lack of hardware support definitely hurt WiG’s reputation amongst geocachers.
Builder Issues
The last and possibly biggest reason why WiG failed to catch on really had to do with the way the cartridges were built. In order to build a successful cartridge, you had to use the Groundspeak builder application. Although a great idea at the time, the builder app itself was also very unstable and prone to crashing. I myself spent many hours of backing up my WiG work because I knew the builder was so unstable. For a very long time, the official builder was the only one available to use. Today there are alternatives (Earwigo and Urwigo) but the damage had already been done. WiG had already built a bad reputation as being a cool idea with a series of hurdles that it never really overcame.
Here in New Brunswick, we actually have 10 WiG cartridges listed for our province. I myself wrote the first one in Atlantic Canada, and since then many more have popped up including a new one recently by Team Bikefast. It’s unfortunate that this platform has suffered the way it has because I think the potential for it is huge. It really provides a much more full experience for location based adventures than just going out and snagging a cache. I always have hope that Groundspeak will revive this struggling technology and find a way to improve it. Until then, we can settle for the few WiG’s that exist out there today or simply ignore them like many have already.
I think the relationship between Groundspeak and Garmin is not what it once was, and this also may be impacting WiG’s.
I was working on one and was hoping to finish it last month but got tied up with “getting married”. I hope to finish it soon.
I really enjoy doing WiGs, hope to see more pop up.
NinjaJedi hit on something that I heard was the primary reason behind groundspeak essentially “abandoning” Wherigos-that is, the soured relationship between Groundspeak and Garmin. Wherigo is predominantly a Garmin platform program. Back in 2010, a number of things started happening which led to a lot of speculation: Garmin started up a competing caching site (Opencaching); Garmin kept people in the dark about the “chirp” device until just before launch; and, the removal of the Groundspeak geocaching logo on their GPS machines. I noticed at the same time that Groundspeak would consistently list Garmin units at the bottom whenever you did a search for uploading field notes, finding a GPS device, etc. I am really curious about what led to this issue between the two companies.
I found some info digging through some forum sites:
http://forums.gps.org.nz/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5824
http://www.secaching.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1183
One of those threads I saw awhile back. I had heard the same thing that the two companies had a falling out. I also saw a forum posting somewhere where a user had said that Garmin claimed their lack of WiG support came from GSP’s unwillingness to license the platform to them anymore for a reasonable price, or something like that.
The Jeremy Irish himself (apparently) posted a counter post to that indicating that licensing was never an issue with Garmin and that Garmin simply did not want to continue to use WiG on their devices.
I had the link at one time and it may be on here somewhere but I don’t remember where it was.
When I saw that GSP had bought the Wigo app for the iPhone and turned it into the official player for iPhone that this was a sign they were still interested in pursuing the platform. But that was quite a ways back and it seems WiG has slipped into the void again.
We discussed this in one of the podcast as well, we referenced that link in the forums.
I love them, they are very cool. I built one on the Dobson trail a couple years ago and it was more trouble than it was worth. I built it to be compatible with the Garmin Oregon even though I was using my blackberry at the time. The funny thing was that it worked best on every other drvice but the Oregon, when I got my android it worked perfect and it worked great on the iPhone as well, weird. The main problem was the final set of coordinates would show in the picture at the end on everything but the Oregon. I have since abandoned it and don’t plan on making another anytime soon, even though it was fun to make and fun to find. I have found 8 Wherigo’s , one is in NS but I still have three in NB I still have left to find but two I have passed on many times as they don’t interest me, too puzzle like. I wish there were more around as long as they are not ridiculously long.
I haven’t really made a serious attempt at a WIG based on some crashes in the beginning but if someone with experience doing one on an android I would most certainly join and play along. I think the concept is cool and interesting. I’ll blame my lack of playing them on laziness and a lack of confidence using the app
I’ve done a couple, and my experience with them has been hit or miss. If well executed, researched, and planned out by the owner, it really can be a fun experience.
I’d really like to make one but I’d need some instruction. I’d definitely attend if a Wherigo 101 event was held. *Hint, hint,*
I would definitely be up for attending a Wherigo building event as well. I love doing them and have done 8 to date and would like to be able to do more in the area. Hopefully somebody takes the reins and organizes one for us “newbies” to wherigo. lol
I am very interested in attending a Wherigo event as well-more around doing/solving than creating.
I did an event about building these awhile back. Maybe I should do it again.
Here’s the slide deck from that event.
https://www.cacheupnb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/WhatAboutWheriGo.pdf
Stumbled upon this today:
http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=238478&view=findpost&p=5109929
According to one of the posters, Jeremy Irish spoke about WiG recently at a UK mega event and said it was back on his radar. I wonder if this is actually true and if maybe we’ll see some resurgence.