Digital Private Geocaching App???

October 17, 2017 6:05 PM

My wife is working on a project where she needs to associate video content with specific locations (within say 10-20 feet). She's having a hard time trying to find an app that will help with the project, and I'm hoping someone here knows of an app (or some other solution) that could work. Additional details below the fold.

This is for an activity where groups of people will be walking around a college campus going to a series of outdoor landmarks. When they get to each landmark, she wants a YouTube video to pop-up. They'll all be using iPads supplied by the college. This kinda sounded like some sort of digital geocaching to me, but I couldn't find anything she could use along those lines. The perfect ideal solution would actually be some sort of augmented reality thing that is free and requires zero coding.

She's tried an app called Aurasma, which uses photos of an object, but it seems too dependent on lighting conditions and alignment to the landmark to be perfect.

posted by noneuclidean to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I tried searching with variations of GPS + scavenger hunt/tour + tablet/app/creator and turned up a few options. Actionbound seems like it might do what you need.
posted by yeahlikethat at 6:17 PM on October 17, 2017

For a slightly lower-tech solution: If she can put up small signs near the landmarks, I've used laminated pages with QR codes to do something similar. On the devices, I loaded the Opera browser which has a QR option built in (when you tap the address bar and the keyboard pops up, one of the buttons is a QR scanner.)
posted by asterisk at 6:37 PM on October 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Try 'geofencing' as your search term.
posted by glibhamdreck at 6:46 PM on October 17, 2017

If you're finding that GPS solutions are flaky, you can look into beacons, which are small Bluetooth transmitters. I haven't done it myself, but there are products that help you integrate beacons with your app. Here's an example of one - YouTube video.
posted by beyond_pink at 5:17 AM on October 18, 2017

Intercaching might be an option. This link says adding videos is possible.
posted by Dotty at 7:25 AM on October 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

I haven't used it myself, but maybe Cluekeeper?
posted by daisyace at 4:10 PM on October 18, 2017

(sorry - missed the request for "zero-coding")

Don't know that you need an "App" - on newer versions of mobile phone platforms, you might be able to create a website:

- Apple/iOS Safari GPS
- Android/Google Chrome GPS (Note - you will have to host your website using HTTPS)

You don't necessarily need to have any server-side processing - pretty simply to check in JavaScript to test if current coordinate is inside of your defined "fence", using a data file (JSON/XML), retrieved passively from the server:

- geolib.GetDistance()
posted by jkaczor at 2:45 PM on October 20, 2017

Response by poster: Late followup, but thank you all for the suggestions. My wife looked into all of them and none fit perfectly with what she was trying to do. It ended up being rainy the day of the event, so she went with her backup plan of using pictures of the landmarks on posters indoors, and Aurasma for the AR component. Happily, the event was a huge success!
posted by noneuclidean at 5:09 AM on October 30, 2017