walkie-talkie

The Problem

Movement is fun and makes for healthier and happier people. Too many forms of modern entertainment make people sedentary.

The Solution

Walkie-talkie is a computer gaming experience, played by walking around. Take your mobile phone, plug in your freebuds, and let the story begin.The path you take through town or nature, affects the content and arc of your story line.

Current state

During the hackathon we developed an application that tracks the user on their walk, and tells an unfolding story line affected by the user's path through the city. Grab hold of your mobile phone, put in your freebuds and try it out at https://walkietalkie.tech.

How it works:

• The users personalize their own worlds and stories. The content of a story may be fictional or semifactual, realistic, sci-fi or fantastic, and while many suggestions for story themes are available, the user is in full control of what world they want to walk around in.
• While walking along outside, the story unfolds and at many points the user is given choices on how to progress the storyline.
• By choosing differents paths, the user can control the story line..

Impact

Will people keep moving to hear the story? We hope so!

Technologies

We use Flutter, Node, Open Streemaps, Typescript, UpCloud, PostgreSQL, Postgrest, Supabase, GPT4 and OpenAI TTS. We use the geolocation to determine where the user is and choices made on direction.

Future plans

We plan to integrate additional features such as:

• Social interaction - when two people using the application are close to each other, their worlds and stories influence each other. Or go together on a walk and have the characters work together.
• The current ways of interacting with the story only use a fraction of the possibilities for interactions by walking. Locations, monuments and historical facts of the locations the user walks in can be embedded into the story line, and suddenly the story e.g. can be a semifictional romp through the medieval origins of their city.
• Modern phones have many more sensors, and these can be added in and affect the story. Users can e.g. be encouraged to move faster or slower, get their heart rate up or down, take longer or shorter steps and let it affect the actions that unfold at different times.
• Voice chat is becoming a mature technology, and it may be possible to let the user gain more control of the story by conversing with the Walkie-Talkie app, while walking.