7 ms·

Fog of World

274 points by olliwang 14y ago

scoremotive 14y ago
I like this idea a lot. I remember there used to be apps on Facebook that listed the states someone had been to. They were fairly popular for a while. If this can tap into that same urge, I think it could do pretty well.
daedalus_j 14y ago
I love this concept, I already think about maps this way in my head, I'd love a way to externalize it! Unfortunately though I don't want it on game center, I want it in some sort of open exportable data that I can access, perhaps make a widget for my website out of, or update from other devices.
smilliken 14y ago
This is a wonderful idea. It would be really interesting if you could "ally" someone else to combine mini-maps. With this feature, you wouldn't just know where everyone has been, but you can also map their social graph!
klausjensen 14y ago
Great idea! Please do android next. And make the data open and exportable.
BklynJay 14y ago
I love the concept but $4.99 is a bit much.
- gensym 14y ago
  Yikes, "love" isn't even worth $5 anymore? Glad I'm not in the flower industry.
drawkbox 14y ago
This is truly one of those simple great ideas that we all should have come up with.
- vhf 14y ago
  In fact, I did came up with this idea one year ago. My idea was to cover the whole world with fog of war, and to make people team up to discover the world. There would be challenges, where you would pay like 0.50$ to participate, and then big reward for the first team achieving the challenge. My idea was a free app with paying challenges. Uncovering 25% of the world ? $1 challenge, 20k$ reward. It's a really easy win. People tend to like these kind of idea, they would contact their friend abroad to team up with them, then pay to join the challenge, etc. I finally decided, after 3months of thoughts, not to realize this project. It's currently impossible to rely confidently on geolocalisation data from any mobile device. People could cheat from iPhone dev. simulator, etc. Well, kudos to people who did it ! Different from my idea, but anyway. Now that it's been done, I can finally explain the idea I had ! :)
  - iamdave 14y ago
    25% of the world is a lot of travelling and expenses for a $1 payoff.
    - vhf 14y ago
      Reversely, paying 1$ in not much when you'll be travelling 25% of the world. In my very basic example it was 20 000$ payoff for travelling 25% of the world. Let's make it 1 000 000$. I'm still winning. Covering 25% of the world's surface is almost impossible. Yet, with my app idea, people would have most probably paid for taking the 1$ challenge (i.e. paying 1$ to participate, winning 1M$ for being the first to achieve the goal). To expand on my concept, there would have been teams, anyone could create a new team, creating teams would have been free, people could have joined as many team as they wanted. It's easy to go viral on these stuff. Every participant would probably call their friend oversea to tell them to join their team on this particular challenge, i.e. paying 1$ with the 1M$ reward in sight. The reward would be splitted between participants of the winning team (pro rata the surface covered).
      - iamdave 14y ago
        Are you going to go through with it? I'm looking for a good excuse to just gtfo of dodge for a while
flavien_bessede 14y ago
Love the idea, now I hope they made sure to not eat all my battery :)
mcantelon 14y ago
What is this thing? Achievement badges for going places? I don't know the "Fog of War" strategy game reference which would likely contextualize it.
- Dramatize 14y ago
  When playing a rts game, the map is revealed once you discover it. Fog of war refers to not being able to view the game map.
- Androsynth 14y ago
  In strategy games, there is a fog over areas where you have no vision (ie places you dont have any units that can see exactly what is happening at that moment). This introduces uncertainty and allows for more strategy based on positioning and vision. This is based on a real military concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_of_war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_of_war
- thomaslangston 14y ago
  In (particularly real-time) strategy games the map is often hidden or grayed out at the beginning of a match beneath a "fog of war". As you move your units around the map the area in their vision is revealed. This is particularly important as there may be enemies/objectives in sections of the map which are unexplored.
- nemof 14y ago
  While people have described this in regards to RTS games, I feel that it might be more appropriate to link it to RPG games where unexplored parts of the map are obscured by a fog until you visit them. It's worth also noting that some gamers who are real completists love visiting every location to remove the fog, and there's often achievements linked to this.
malandrew 14y ago
This is totally going to be cool for use while riding my bike to work. I've been toying with the idea of exploring new paths on my 11 mile commute and this gives me a way to map them all out and the incentive to do so.
- angryasian 14y ago
  you should check out mytracks from google https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.maps.mytracks&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... might be more appropriate for what you're looking for
jcfrei 14y ago
very cool, though that Explored Area status bar is probably going to be stuck at 0.001% (or less) for a while... I wonder what surface you "discover" when you're standing in place - I'm guessing around 300 m^2?
- olliwang 14y ago
  It's actually only tens of square meters.
Dramatize 14y ago
I would love to pay $.99 for this, but at $5.49 it's too expensive for me recommend to all my friends.
- mrestko 14y ago
  Just out of curiosity, would you be willing to say what your hourly wage is?
- kinkora 14y ago
  I am always curious why when people say that $x.xx (or any app that is not $.99) is too expensive for an app. A meal (burger, fries and a drink) in McDonalds will cost you at least $5~$9 depending on the size of the meal you get. Would you say that is expensive? Yet, when an app is anywhere from $2~$10, people will deem it as "expensive". It astounds me when people don't give a thought about spending $10 on food but when it comes to any software-related stuff, the same $10 is "too much".
  - kevinh 14y ago
    There's a difference between buying food, a necessity, and an app, a luxury. And when you use your McDonald's example, you're assuming that the person you're conversing with is willing to pay $5-$9 for a meal at McDonald's. Many people who won't pay more than a buck for an app won't be spending more than a couple bucks on a meal at McDonald's anyway.
  - Dramatize 14y ago
    It comes down to risk. I know exactly what I'm getting for $5 worth of McDonalds. $5 for an app feels more risky because I have no idea if there will be any value.
    - cdash 14y ago
      You only know what you are getting from McDonalds because you have bought it before, well what about your first time eating at McDonalds? You certainly did not know what you were getting then.
Aardwolf 14y ago
Cool idea, but I think my life will be way longer than the lifetime of this app. I think I could do something similar in an open format that will still be accessible in 50 years: an image of the world map, with an alpha channel that has pixels where I've been made opaque.
obituary_latte 14y ago
In case the dev is reading these: typo in bullet 6 at bottom >It is recommended to use a separate GPS device to record your tracks. This would save beattery life of your iOS device and avoid GPS signal loss when Internet connection is unavailable. Otherwise, looks batteful.
- olliwang 14y ago
  Thanks. We already fixed that. ;)
kristofferR 14y ago
This looks really nice. I recently switched to Android (which, in my mind, with version 4.1 finally is able to compete with iOS in smoothness/stability while vastly surpassing it in features and usability), so I'm hopeful for an Android version. An Android version would also bring added benefits of smarter/less battery intensive background operation which could make this run all the time. Constant GPS-monitoring like Latitude or this seems to run way better on Android for some reason.
- MrScruff 14y ago
  * An Android version would also bring added benefits of smarter/less battery intensive background operation which could make this run all the time. Constant GPS-monitoring like Latitude or this seems to run way better on Android for some reason. * I'm curious, what makes you think this would more power efficient on Android?
  - kristofferR 14y ago
    This is purely speculative, but I think there are a couple of reasons why apps like this runs better on Android. I think it mainly boils down to the fact that app developers on Android have much more freedom than on iOS, for example - instead of having to run the whole app in the background they can just run a small daemon. Android apps don't resort to weird workarounds, like in regular intervals doing something that requires some CPU power, in order to not get autokilled/paused like inactive apps often are on iOS. On Android they can also do stuff like only using the GPS (which is very battery intensive) if they notice that the cell phone antenna/wifi reception is changing (indicating that you're not standing/sitting still) while GPS background logging on iOS requires constant GPS-logging. Limits like that makes iOS use way more battery for background location tracking, in my experience at least. Another reason may be simply that Android phones tend to have larger batteries (in mAh) than iPhones do (the iPhone 5 has a 1440mAh battery, the Samsung Galaxy S3 has 2100mAh battery). While the iPhone 5 is generally more power efficient than the S3 (due to slower CPU with less cores, smaller display and a more optimized OS), I'd imagine that their GPS chips uses approximately the same power, draining the iPhone battery faster since it simply has less power stored.
FaceKicker 14y ago
This is neat, I wish Google Latitude had it. For that matter, I wish Google Latitude had any useful visual representation of the 2+ years' worth of location data I've been feeding it. =|
- bla2 14y ago
  If you've enabled location history, you can look at this data in the web interface at http://google.com/latitude http://google.com/latitude
- angryasian 14y ago
  I suggest you check out google latitude - dashboard feature, its shows some amazing stats along with automatically detecting trips for you.
- olliwang 14y ago
  Some new importing sources are considering. Google Latitude is no doubt one of them. Stay tuned.
- greggman 14y ago
  Um, have you actually tried using the Web interface? Here's a screenshot from my vacation a few days ago. http://greggman.com/downloads/examples/latitude-maps.png http://greggman.com/downloads/examples/latitude-maps.png
  - barrkel 14y ago
    That completely sucks in comparison to the app posted here, unfortunately.
    - greggman 14y ago
      That may be true but my response wasn't to compare it to the app. It was in response to For that matter, I wish Google Latitude had any useful visual representation of the 2+ years' worth of location data I've been feeding it. Latitude does have a useful visual representation. It also makes all the data available for you to do any other representation you'd like. See links in screenshot for downloading the data.
Androsynth 14y ago
When I used to live in SF, I would always go on walks and explore the city. I found that it would take several visits before I could fully remember the details of a new route or area, but once I knew that place I would move onto a new area. This was enjoyable and I got to see the innards of a beautiful city. Now this? Congratulations, you have turned a peaceful and enjoyable experience into a slot machine. Now rather than enjoying where I am, I can enjoy hearing my phone go DING! You will lose all connection to the places you go. Rather than rely on my own memory, which takes a few trips, I will just go to a neighborhood once, cross it off my checklist and probably never go back. Because going back wont give me the exp I need to level up and release endorphins. Gamifaction is the public relations term for addiction. Anyway, get off my lawn, yada yada...
- evan_ 14y ago
  > Congratulations, you have turned a peaceful and enjoyable experience into a slot machine. So don't use it?
  - Androsynth 14y ago
    well obviously. But I want others to see gamification for what it really is. The decision to use gamification in your products is similar to the decision to add fiberglass to cigarettes in the mid 20th century. Executives at tobacco companies didnt think it was bad, they just knew it would increase profits. Obviously this app does not have the same scope as cigarettes. But slowly more and more products/games are moving towards this model. The AAA game industry very quickly adopted zynga-esque addiction mechanics rather than 'fun' mechanics. edit: before I get downvoted for what might seem like a ridiculous comparison, let me give some context. About a month ago, one of my favorite MMOs ever, and imo the greatest MMO ever made, Vanguard:SOH was changed from subscription to F2P by its owner SOE. VG:SOH is the deepest, most complex MMO ever created and has a huge world. However once it went F2P, SOE turned it into essentially a zynga game. It changed from an rpg to an item-driven grind fest (ie keep grinding these same quests and you can get epic loot). Then you can buy xp potions to make leveling go by faster. In short they turned it from a rpg into slot machine. With a consistent and easy path to get your endorphin bursts. Now this isn't that different than what every other AAA game studio is doing to their games (except maybe Valve). The path is clear to them. The term gamification exists because non-game companies want to take advantage of this model. But what they don't understand is that they are making shallow, heartless products that guide you towards their goals rather than making something fun and enjoyable. In other words, the cigarette analogy is perfectly apt. Cigarettes have been made optimally efficient to cause addiction whereas previously they had just been an enjoyable experience and not nearly as addictive. Addiction profit is a gold mine.
Shenglong 14y ago
Time to go for 100% map completion...
timsally 14y ago
Thank God this costs $5 dollars. I might have even gone as high as $10. To all those that think 5 bucks is too much: for you to actually get any value out of this app you have to use it over a non-significant portion of your life. We're talking on the timescale of years; I find it hilarious that 1 dollar is fine but 5 whole dollars is outrageous.
- Dramatize 14y ago
  You and I might be able to justify the price, but 99% of the people I know will not. That means this is not a product I would be able to get most of my social group to use.
  - igorgue 14y ago
    You mean people who travel around the world can't spend 5 bucks on an iPhone app, makes sense :-)
    - andrewflnr 14y ago
      What he means is that most people, including those in his social circle, are irrational about paying for apps, and so won't use it.
      - olefoo 14y ago
        Are they being irrational? Most apps are opened once, twice at most. A small percentage of apps downloaded are used at all after the first day on the user's device. A very few make it into daily use; and most of those are on the device the day it's purchased. This is because most apps are not compelling experiences. If you factor in the risk that this app, like most of the ones they have seen so far; will not be in their life for more than 10 minutes... I would say they are being rational in their pricing bias. There are two ways around this. You can communicate your value ahead of time to your potential customers, which Fog Of World does fairly well. Or you can build a business model that has usage based pricing through in-app purchases, so that people who are regular users are paying their way.
kolinko 14y ago
Looks great, although I'm to worried of my iPhone's battery to install..
whouweling 14y ago
Nice concept. Some feedback on the site itself: I'm having trouble reading the text due to the low contrast. (Maybe my monitor isn't setup properly?)
atlbeer 14y ago
I love this idea. Unfortunately my GPX export from Foursquare doesn't seem to show up in the application. I used this utility for what it's worth: http://etgps.net/gps/4sq/ http://etgps.net/gps/4sq/
- olliwang 14y ago
  The utility treats each checked-in locations as part of a track. But you don't actually follow the route to visit each places, right? That's why those locations won't be imported. You need to find a tool to convert those locations to tracks. Each track only contains one location. That will work.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
bobbles 14y ago
Sweet, just purchased. I travel internationally quite a bit, actually feeling a bit bummed this didn't exist a couple of years ago :( Hopefully doesn't eat so much battery that my phone dies before the day is over.
lambada 14y ago
Couple of questions if anyone has bought it and can answer: 1) Extending the fog of war metaphor, do places gradually 'fade' or 'grey-out' or similar the longer you are away from the area? Or is it a case of once-seen always seen? 2) This seems great for the devices that have GPS, but I'm sceptical of it's value on say, my iPod Touch, which IIRC relies entirely on Wi-Fi triangulation.
- olliwang 14y ago
  (1) It's once-seen, always seen. (2) You can use a separate GPS logger to record your tracks and import them back to the app. A dedicated GPS logger is usually small, light-weight, long battery life, and better for receiving GPS signal when there is no Internet connection.
dredmorbius 14y ago
Holy fucking grey-on-grey. Even if it fits the fog meme, STOP IT. http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/
- awolf 14y ago
  You mean theme. Not meme.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    The theme meme and meme themes should also be stopped.
lancefisher 14y ago
Cool! I can't wait to load the last two years of my running tracks!
ruu1989 14y ago
Anyone got any idea of battery life running this on... Say and iPhone 4S?
luchs 14y ago
"Nebel des Welt" should be "Nebel der Welt" in the German translation.
- olliwang 14y ago
  Thanks. We already fixed this on our website, and will be fixed in the app in version 1.2 (version 1.1 was already submitted for review).
colmvp 14y ago
gl hf nr
beatpanda 14y ago
Correction — "Know the Area You Have Explored Around the World, Around A Continent, Or Even Around A Country, Where Your Phone Had A Full Battery, GPS Was Available, And There Was Reliable Electricity For Recharging!" This is dumb. Any given user is going to have massive holes in their map, which, at least according to my experience, will be the best parts of their trips — the parts where they didn't have their phone turned on and didn't care, because it didn't matter. The problem with all of these dumb travel apps for smartphones is they only seem to be geared toward people who travel with defined itineraries, pay money for accommodation and travel, and only travel in more developed, predictable places. In other words, the most boring kind of travel. Vayable is the only company I've seen trying to make money from adventurous travel, but even then, it's for purchasing adventurous travel for people who can't find it on their own. And I still can't find a reasonably good offline maps app for Android, for when access to the Internet isn't so easy.
- drumdance 14y ago
  All this boring travel you disdain encompasses 95% of tourism spending. It may be boring to you, but it's hard for me to get mad at a product that targets a market that huge.
  - beatpanda 14y ago
    95% of existing tourism spending. There's a big untapped market out there.
    - adambratt 14y ago
      It's true. The stuff off the beaten path usually hasn't been commercialized. Thus it makes sense why it would only account for 5% of the spending
      - kisielk 14y ago
        Once it's commercialized it won't be off the beaten path for long.
bluekeybox 14y ago
Is this specific to iOS5 and later? I long ago was very interested in something like this, but at the time (iOS3...) my understanding was that Apple didn't allow apps running in the background collecting data.
- olliwang 14y ago
  Unfortunately, iOS 5 is required at least.
bdr 14y ago
I love everything about it except the gamification. They were really onto something inspiring, and then I got to the part about achievements and leaderboards. Beyond a certain audience, that's patronizing, and it undermines anything more serious you're trying to do (c.f. "your whole life journey").
Devilboy 14y ago
Be careful what you measure because measuring affects what you measure. You'll probably end up travelling a lot more, probably driving more and so on.
Tiz 14y ago
This is revolutionary, I've always been a advocate of incorporating a gaming atmosphere into everyday activities. This is a great push in that direction!
corporalagumbo 14y ago
Cool idea (I've done 100% on a few Zeldas, Metroids etc... I know this will appeal.) I have to say the prose copy is a bit clunky though.
ablefire 14y ago
I bought the app and like it. Perhaps I have not discovered it yet but I would like to enter the places that I have been in the past. This would be for my own enjoyment and could be a different mode from the "game mode" which is based on actual GPS data.
3rd3 14y ago
This is a demystification of the world I don’t like!
lubujackson 14y ago
I would never use this because I'm an old luddite now, but damn this is a great idea!
lubujackson 14y ago
Here's my suggestion - make the app free and sell users their data back in city map/country map/world map form, and link it to their vacation photos. That would be really awesome, and is totally possible with GPS in cameras now or with phone cameras.
- jaequery 14y ago
  don't know if it was just me but, with a name like fog of war, i thought this app was going to be "warcraft" in real-life. that would've been really cool.
ionforce 14y ago
Does anyone know what the buttons do? I could venture a guess but I'm not like... 100% clear on what does what.
- olliwang 14y ago
  When the REC button is red, the app start recording your locations (even in background). Make sure there are at least 3 GPS signal bars, or no locations will be recorded.
lindvall 14y ago
The app looks pretty great. Being able to incorporate the geolocation data from foursquare, instagram, flickr, facebook, etc. would aid in not feeling like you have to think of your traveling as starting when you downloaded the app.
kiwiguy1million 14y ago
Where is New Zealand on the icon and http://media.fogofworld.com/images/gpx.png http://media.fogofworld.com/images/gpx.png? :P
olliwang 14y ago
I'm the creator of this app. I'd like to explain the idea behind this app a bit. Our dream is to go around the world, so we create this geo/map/game hybrid app to remember everywhere we have been in our whole life time. We want to use the exploration map to memorize our entire life when we are old and unable to walk. We also use the map to find out places nearby where we live but we never know. We actually got surprised many times that we found a lot of new places around where we live but we hadn't been in the past ten years. I visited Japan four years ago, but honestly, I really don't remember those places I had been at that time, except few really famous places. I don't even know what hotels I lived, what roads I walked that time. And that's why I build this app. Now I can see the map and memorize what happened at those places I had been.
- gurkendoktor 14y ago
  But what if the hotels aren't there anymore? All you'll know is that you have been at these geo-coordinates once. I have the same plan for when I'm old, so I take pictures with my iPhone whenever I want to hold on to a moment (and taking a photo is convenient). The image quality may be crappy, but I end up with one more GPS-tagged picture on the world map. The iPad Photos app nicely visualizes this, before that I'd used iPhoto. Maybe you could add support for this too and overlay it with the "fog of world"?
  - olliwang 14y ago
    Even though the hotels aren't there anymore. We can still memorize the hotels we visited before. They are not there, so we can memorize, right? Mapping photos to the exploration map is planned in future version, or even for a Mac version. But there are a couple of higher priority tasks we need to do before that, such as support for sync between devices.
- mainevent 14y ago
  Love the idea. Just downloaded. I agree with some of the other comments that using it in some of the places I've travelled would be unrealistic due to battery life. Would be great if I could import a csv of my Flight Diary data [1] [1] http://flightdiary.net/willjennings http://flightdiary.net/willjennings
densh 14y ago
That's an incredible idea. I really wish it was available a desktop application though. Such an app could gather information from multiple sources (including companion mobile apps) and maybe even location-aware social networks. It's useful on a mobile phone but i would rather buy a dedicated gps device to track my progress as constant usage of gps on a phone will definitely decrease it's battery life. Also I really feel uncomfortable handling this kind of historical data to any sort of SaaS. I would definitely pay as high as $10 (or maybe even more) for something like that.
6ren 14y ago
Also a forensic tool, a personal blackbox.
Bankq 14y ago
Quick correction: the Chinese translation of supporting iCloud should be 即将支持iCloud, but not 即将支援iCloud
mrbogle 14y ago
Is there any way to get any existing data on the iphone into the app (preferably without too much pain)? I assume it's already logging my info: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/ http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/
EdgarVerona 14y ago
Great idea! Did you make that? Will there be an Android version?
charlieok 14y ago
I think this is cool, despite the fact that it will undoubtedly leave out some interesting experiences. However, it also serves as a visceral reminder of the kind of data being made available to third parties when using this type of app. It makes me want to create something similar which I and everyone else wishing to use it can then keep entirely to ourselves.

274 points by olliwang 14y ago

I like this idea a lot. I remember there used to be apps on Facebook that listed the states someone had been to. They were fairly popular for a while. If this can tap into that same urge, I think it could do pretty well.

daedalus_j 14y ago

I love this concept, I already think about maps this way in my head, I'd love a way to externalize it! Unfortunately though I don't want it on game center, I want it in some sort of open exportable data that I can access, perhaps make a widget for my website out of, or update from other devices.

smilliken 14y ago

This is a wonderful idea. It would be really interesting if you could "ally" someone else to combine mini-maps. With this feature, you wouldn't just know where everyone has been, but you can also map their social graph!

klausjensen 14y ago

Great idea! Please do android next. And make the data open and exportable.

BklynJay 14y ago

I love the concept but $4.99 is a bit much.

gensym 14y ago
Yikes, "love" isn't even worth $5 anymore? Glad I'm not in the flower industry.

drawkbox 14y ago

This is truly one of those simple great ideas that we all should have come up with.

vhf 14y ago
In fact, I did came up with this idea one year ago. My idea was to cover the whole world with fog of war, and to make people team up to discover the world. There would be challenges, where you would pay like 0.50$ to participate, and then big reward for the first team achieving the challenge. My idea was a free app with paying challenges. Uncovering 25% of the world ? $1 challenge, 20k$ reward. It's a really easy win. People tend to like these kind of idea, they would contact their friend abroad to team up with them, then pay to join the challenge, etc. I finally decided, after 3months of thoughts, not to realize this project. It's currently impossible to rely confidently on geolocalisation data from any mobile device. People could cheat from iPhone dev. simulator, etc. Well, kudos to people who did it ! Different from my idea, but anyway. Now that it's been done, I can finally explain the idea I had ! :)
- iamdave 14y ago
  25% of the world is a lot of travelling and expenses for a $1 payoff.
  - vhf 14y ago
    Reversely, paying 1$ in not much when you'll be travelling 25% of the world. In my very basic example it was 20 000$ payoff for travelling 25% of the world. Let's make it 1 000 000$. I'm still winning. Covering 25% of the world's surface is almost impossible. Yet, with my app idea, people would have most probably paid for taking the 1$ challenge (i.e. paying 1$ to participate, winning 1M$ for being the first to achieve the goal). To expand on my concept, there would have been teams, anyone could create a new team, creating teams would have been free, people could have joined as many team as they wanted. It's easy to go viral on these stuff. Every participant would probably call their friend oversea to tell them to join their team on this particular challenge, i.e. paying 1$ with the 1M$ reward in sight. The reward would be splitted between participants of the winning team (pro rata the surface covered).
    - iamdave 14y ago
      Are you going to go through with it? I'm looking for a good excuse to just gtfo of dodge for a while

flavien_bessede 14y ago

Love the idea, now I hope they made sure to not eat all my battery :)

mcantelon 14y ago

What is this thing? Achievement badges for going places? I don't know the "Fog of War" strategy game reference which would likely contextualize it.

Dramatize 14y ago
When playing a rts game, the map is revealed once you discover it. Fog of war refers to not being able to view the game map.
Androsynth 14y ago
In strategy games, there is a fog over areas where you have no vision (ie places you dont have any units that can see exactly what is happening at that moment). This introduces uncertainty and allows for more strategy based on positioning and vision. This is based on a real military concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_of_war http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_of_war
thomaslangston 14y ago
In (particularly real-time) strategy games the map is often hidden or grayed out at the beginning of a match beneath a "fog of war". As you move your units around the map the area in their vision is revealed. This is particularly important as there may be enemies/objectives in sections of the map which are unexplored.
nemof 14y ago
While people have described this in regards to RTS games, I feel that it might be more appropriate to link it to RPG games where unexplored parts of the map are obscured by a fog until you visit them. It's worth also noting that some gamers who are real completists love visiting every location to remove the fog, and there's often achievements linked to this.

malandrew 14y ago

This is totally going to be cool for use while riding my bike to work. I've been toying with the idea of exploring new paths on my 11 mile commute and this gives me a way to map them all out and the incentive to do so.

angryasian 14y ago
you should check out mytracks from google https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.maps.mytracks&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... might be more appropriate for what you're looking for

jcfrei 14y ago

very cool, though that Explored Area status bar is probably going to be stuck at 0.001% (or less) for a while... I wonder what surface you "discover" when you're standing in place - I'm guessing around 300 m^2?

olliwang 14y ago
It's actually only tens of square meters.

Dramatize 14y ago

I would love to pay $.99 for this, but at $5.49 it's too expensive for me recommend to all my friends.

mrestko 14y ago
Just out of curiosity, would you be willing to say what your hourly wage is?
kinkora 14y ago
I am always curious why when people say that $x.xx (or any app that is not $.99) is too expensive for an app. A meal (burger, fries and a drink) in McDonalds will cost you at least $5~$9 depending on the size of the meal you get. Would you say that is expensive? Yet, when an app is anywhere from $2~$10, people will deem it as "expensive". It astounds me when people don't give a thought about spending $10 on food but when it comes to any software-related stuff, the same $10 is "too much".
- kevinh 14y ago
  There's a difference between buying food, a necessity, and an app, a luxury. And when you use your McDonald's example, you're assuming that the person you're conversing with is willing to pay $5-$9 for a meal at McDonald's. Many people who won't pay more than a buck for an app won't be spending more than a couple bucks on a meal at McDonald's anyway.
- Dramatize 14y ago
  It comes down to risk. I know exactly what I'm getting for $5 worth of McDonalds. $5 for an app feels more risky because I have no idea if there will be any value.
  - cdash 14y ago
    You only know what you are getting from McDonalds because you have bought it before, well what about your first time eating at McDonalds? You certainly did not know what you were getting then.

Aardwolf 14y ago

Cool idea, but I think my life will be way longer than the lifetime of this app. I think I could do something similar in an open format that will still be accessible in 50 years: an image of the world map, with an alpha channel that has pixels where I've been made opaque.

obituary_latte 14y ago

In case the dev is reading these: typo in bullet 6 at bottom >It is recommended to use a separate GPS device to record your tracks. This would save beattery life of your iOS device and avoid GPS signal loss when Internet connection is unavailable. Otherwise, looks batteful.

olliwang 14y ago
Thanks. We already fixed that. ;)

kristofferR 14y ago

This looks really nice. I recently switched to Android (which, in my mind, with version 4.1 finally is able to compete with iOS in smoothness/stability while vastly surpassing it in features and usability), so I'm hopeful for an Android version. An Android version would also bring added benefits of smarter/less battery intensive background operation which could make this run all the time. Constant GPS-monitoring like Latitude or this seems to run way better on Android for some reason.

MrScruff 14y ago
* An Android version would also bring added benefits of smarter/less battery intensive background operation which could make this run all the time. Constant GPS-monitoring like Latitude or this seems to run way better on Android for some reason. * I'm curious, what makes you think this would more power efficient on Android?
- kristofferR 14y ago
  This is purely speculative, but I think there are a couple of reasons why apps like this runs better on Android. I think it mainly boils down to the fact that app developers on Android have much more freedom than on iOS, for example - instead of having to run the whole app in the background they can just run a small daemon. Android apps don't resort to weird workarounds, like in regular intervals doing something that requires some CPU power, in order to not get autokilled/paused like inactive apps often are on iOS. On Android they can also do stuff like only using the GPS (which is very battery intensive) if they notice that the cell phone antenna/wifi reception is changing (indicating that you're not standing/sitting still) while GPS background logging on iOS requires constant GPS-logging. Limits like that makes iOS use way more battery for background location tracking, in my experience at least. Another reason may be simply that Android phones tend to have larger batteries (in mAh) than iPhones do (the iPhone 5 has a 1440mAh battery, the Samsung Galaxy S3 has 2100mAh battery). While the iPhone 5 is generally more power efficient than the S3 (due to slower CPU with less cores, smaller display and a more optimized OS), I'd imagine that their GPS chips uses approximately the same power, draining the iPhone battery faster since it simply has less power stored.

FaceKicker 14y ago

This is neat, I wish Google Latitude had it. For that matter, I wish Google Latitude had any useful visual representation of the 2+ years' worth of location data I've been feeding it. =|

bla2 14y ago
If you've enabled location history, you can look at this data in the web interface at http://google.com/latitude http://google.com/latitude
angryasian 14y ago
I suggest you check out google latitude - dashboard feature, its shows some amazing stats along with automatically detecting trips for you.
olliwang 14y ago
Some new importing sources are considering. Google Latitude is no doubt one of them. Stay tuned.
greggman 14y ago
Um, have you actually tried using the Web interface? Here's a screenshot from my vacation a few days ago. http://greggman.com/downloads/examples/latitude-maps.png http://greggman.com/downloads/examples/latitude-maps.png
- barrkel 14y ago
  That completely sucks in comparison to the app posted here, unfortunately.
  - greggman 14y ago
    That may be true but my response wasn't to compare it to the app. It was in response to For that matter, I wish Google Latitude had any useful visual representation of the 2+ years' worth of location data I've been feeding it. Latitude does have a useful visual representation. It also makes all the data available for you to do any other representation you'd like. See links in screenshot for downloading the data.

Androsynth 14y ago

When I used to live in SF, I would always go on walks and explore the city. I found that it would take several visits before I could fully remember the details of a new route or area, but once I knew that place I would move onto a new area. This was enjoyable and I got to see the innards of a beautiful city. Now this? Congratulations, you have turned a peaceful and enjoyable experience into a slot machine. Now rather than enjoying where I am, I can enjoy hearing my phone go DING! You will lose all connection to the places you go. Rather than rely on my own memory, which takes a few trips, I will just go to a neighborhood once, cross it off my checklist and probably never go back. Because going back wont give me the exp I need to level up and release endorphins. Gamifaction is the public relations term for addiction. Anyway, get off my lawn, yada yada...

evan_ 14y ago
> Congratulations, you have turned a peaceful and enjoyable experience into a slot machine. So don't use it?
- Androsynth 14y ago
  well obviously. But I want others to see gamification for what it really is. The decision to use gamification in your products is similar to the decision to add fiberglass to cigarettes in the mid 20th century. Executives at tobacco companies didnt think it was bad, they just knew it would increase profits. Obviously this app does not have the same scope as cigarettes. But slowly more and more products/games are moving towards this model. The AAA game industry very quickly adopted zynga-esque addiction mechanics rather than 'fun' mechanics. edit: before I get downvoted for what might seem like a ridiculous comparison, let me give some context. About a month ago, one of my favorite MMOs ever, and imo the greatest MMO ever made, Vanguard:SOH was changed from subscription to F2P by its owner SOE. VG:SOH is the deepest, most complex MMO ever created and has a huge world. However once it went F2P, SOE turned it into essentially a zynga game. It changed from an rpg to an item-driven grind fest (ie keep grinding these same quests and you can get epic loot). Then you can buy xp potions to make leveling go by faster. In short they turned it from a rpg into slot machine. With a consistent and easy path to get your endorphin bursts. Now this isn't that different than what every other AAA game studio is doing to their games (except maybe Valve). The path is clear to them. The term gamification exists because non-game companies want to take advantage of this model. But what they don't understand is that they are making shallow, heartless products that guide you towards their goals rather than making something fun and enjoyable. In other words, the cigarette analogy is perfectly apt. Cigarettes have been made optimally efficient to cause addiction whereas previously they had just been an enjoyable experience and not nearly as addictive. Addiction profit is a gold mine.

Shenglong 14y ago

Time to go for 100% map completion...

timsally 14y ago

Thank God this costs $5 dollars. I might have even gone as high as $10. To all those that think 5 bucks is too much: for you to actually get any value out of this app you have to use it over a non-significant portion of your life. We're talking on the timescale of years; I find it hilarious that 1 dollar is fine but 5 whole dollars is outrageous.

Dramatize 14y ago
You and I might be able to justify the price, but 99% of the people I know will not. That means this is not a product I would be able to get most of my social group to use.
- igorgue 14y ago
  You mean people who travel around the world can't spend 5 bucks on an iPhone app, makes sense :-)
  - andrewflnr 14y ago
    What he means is that most people, including those in his social circle, are irrational about paying for apps, and so won't use it.
    - olefoo 14y ago
      Are they being irrational? Most apps are opened once, twice at most. A small percentage of apps downloaded are used at all after the first day on the user's device. A very few make it into daily use; and most of those are on the device the day it's purchased. This is because most apps are not compelling experiences. If you factor in the risk that this app, like most of the ones they have seen so far; will not be in their life for more than 10 minutes... I would say they are being rational in their pricing bias. There are two ways around this. You can communicate your value ahead of time to your potential customers, which Fog Of World does fairly well. Or you can build a business model that has usage based pricing through in-app purchases, so that people who are regular users are paying their way.

kolinko 14y ago

Looks great, although I'm to worried of my iPhone's battery to install..

whouweling 14y ago

Nice concept. Some feedback on the site itself: I'm having trouble reading the text due to the low contrast. (Maybe my monitor isn't setup properly?)

atlbeer 14y ago

I love this idea. Unfortunately my GPX export from Foursquare doesn't seem to show up in the application. I used this utility for what it's worth: http://etgps.net/gps/4sq/ http://etgps.net/gps/4sq/

olliwang 14y ago
The utility treats each checked-in locations as part of a track. But you don't actually follow the route to visit each places, right? That's why those locations won't be imported. You need to find a tool to convert those locations to tracks. Each track only contains one location. That will work.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

bobbles 14y ago

Sweet, just purchased. I travel internationally quite a bit, actually feeling a bit bummed this didn't exist a couple of years ago :( Hopefully doesn't eat so much battery that my phone dies before the day is over.

lambada 14y ago

Couple of questions if anyone has bought it and can answer: 1) Extending the fog of war metaphor, do places gradually 'fade' or 'grey-out' or similar the longer you are away from the area? Or is it a case of once-seen always seen? 2) This seems great for the devices that have GPS, but I'm sceptical of it's value on say, my iPod Touch, which IIRC relies entirely on Wi-Fi triangulation.

olliwang 14y ago
(1) It's once-seen, always seen. (2) You can use a separate GPS logger to record your tracks and import them back to the app. A dedicated GPS logger is usually small, light-weight, long battery life, and better for receiving GPS signal when there is no Internet connection.

dredmorbius 14y ago

Holy fucking grey-on-grey. Even if it fits the fog meme, STOP IT. http://contrastrebellion.com/ http://contrastrebellion.com/

awolf 14y ago
You mean theme. Not meme.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  The theme meme and meme themes should also be stopped.

lancefisher 14y ago

Cool! I can't wait to load the last two years of my running tracks!

ruu1989 14y ago

Anyone got any idea of battery life running this on... Say and iPhone 4S?

luchs 14y ago

"Nebel des Welt" should be "Nebel der Welt" in the German translation.

olliwang 14y ago
Thanks. We already fixed this on our website, and will be fixed in the app in version 1.2 (version 1.1 was already submitted for review).

colmvp 14y ago

gl hf nr

beatpanda 14y ago

Correction — "Know the Area You Have Explored Around the World, Around A Continent, Or Even Around A Country, Where Your Phone Had A Full Battery, GPS Was Available, And There Was Reliable Electricity For Recharging!" This is dumb. Any given user is going to have massive holes in their map, which, at least according to my experience, will be the best parts of their trips — the parts where they didn't have their phone turned on and didn't care, because it didn't matter. The problem with all of these dumb travel apps for smartphones is they only seem to be geared toward people who travel with defined itineraries, pay money for accommodation and travel, and only travel in more developed, predictable places. In other words, the most boring kind of travel. Vayable is the only company I've seen trying to make money from adventurous travel, but even then, it's for purchasing adventurous travel for people who can't find it on their own. And I still can't find a reasonably good offline maps app for Android, for when access to the Internet isn't so easy.

drumdance 14y ago
All this boring travel you disdain encompasses 95% of tourism spending. It may be boring to you, but it's hard for me to get mad at a product that targets a market that huge.
- beatpanda 14y ago
  95% of existing tourism spending. There's a big untapped market out there.
  - adambratt 14y ago
    It's true. The stuff off the beaten path usually hasn't been commercialized. Thus it makes sense why it would only account for 5% of the spending
    - kisielk 14y ago
      Once it's commercialized it won't be off the beaten path for long.

bluekeybox 14y ago

Is this specific to iOS5 and later? I long ago was very interested in something like this, but at the time (iOS3...) my understanding was that Apple didn't allow apps running in the background collecting data.

olliwang 14y ago
Unfortunately, iOS 5 is required at least.

bdr 14y ago

I love everything about it except the gamification. They were really onto something inspiring, and then I got to the part about achievements and leaderboards. Beyond a certain audience, that's patronizing, and it undermines anything more serious you're trying to do (c.f. "your whole life journey").

Devilboy 14y ago

Be careful what you measure because measuring affects what you measure. You'll probably end up travelling a lot more, probably driving more and so on.

Tiz 14y ago

This is revolutionary, I've always been a advocate of incorporating a gaming atmosphere into everyday activities. This is a great push in that direction!

corporalagumbo 14y ago

Cool idea (I've done 100% on a few Zeldas, Metroids etc... I know this will appeal.) I have to say the prose copy is a bit clunky though.

ablefire 14y ago

I bought the app and like it. Perhaps I have not discovered it yet but I would like to enter the places that I have been in the past. This would be for my own enjoyment and could be a different mode from the "game mode" which is based on actual GPS data.

3rd3 14y ago

This is a demystification of the world I don’t like!

lubujackson 14y ago

I would never use this because I'm an old luddite now, but damn this is a great idea!

lubujackson 14y ago

Here's my suggestion - make the app free and sell users their data back in city map/country map/world map form, and link it to their vacation photos. That would be really awesome, and is totally possible with GPS in cameras now or with phone cameras.

jaequery 14y ago
don't know if it was just me but, with a name like fog of war, i thought this app was going to be "warcraft" in real-life. that would've been really cool.

ionforce 14y ago

Does anyone know what the buttons do? I could venture a guess but I'm not like... 100% clear on what does what.

olliwang 14y ago
When the REC button is red, the app start recording your locations (even in background). Make sure there are at least 3 GPS signal bars, or no locations will be recorded.

lindvall 14y ago

The app looks pretty great. Being able to incorporate the geolocation data from foursquare, instagram, flickr, facebook, etc. would aid in not feeling like you have to think of your traveling as starting when you downloaded the app.

kiwiguy1million 14y ago

Where is New Zealand on the icon and http://media.fogofworld.com/images/gpx.png http://media.fogofworld.com/images/gpx.png? :P

olliwang 14y ago

I'm the creator of this app. I'd like to explain the idea behind this app a bit. Our dream is to go around the world, so we create this geo/map/game hybrid app to remember everywhere we have been in our whole life time. We want to use the exploration map to memorize our entire life when we are old and unable to walk. We also use the map to find out places nearby where we live but we never know. We actually got surprised many times that we found a lot of new places around where we live but we hadn't been in the past ten years. I visited Japan four years ago, but honestly, I really don't remember those places I had been at that time, except few really famous places. I don't even know what hotels I lived, what roads I walked that time. And that's why I build this app. Now I can see the map and memorize what happened at those places I had been.

gurkendoktor 14y ago
But what if the hotels aren't there anymore? All you'll know is that you have been at these geo-coordinates once. I have the same plan for when I'm old, so I take pictures with my iPhone whenever I want to hold on to a moment (and taking a photo is convenient). The image quality may be crappy, but I end up with one more GPS-tagged picture on the world map. The iPad Photos app nicely visualizes this, before that I'd used iPhoto. Maybe you could add support for this too and overlay it with the "fog of world"?
- olliwang 14y ago
  Even though the hotels aren't there anymore. We can still memorize the hotels we visited before. They are not there, so we can memorize, right? Mapping photos to the exploration map is planned in future version, or even for a Mac version. But there are a couple of higher priority tasks we need to do before that, such as support for sync between devices.
mainevent 14y ago
Love the idea. Just downloaded. I agree with some of the other comments that using it in some of the places I've travelled would be unrealistic due to battery life. Would be great if I could import a csv of my Flight Diary data [1] [1] http://flightdiary.net/willjennings http://flightdiary.net/willjennings

densh 14y ago

That's an incredible idea. I really wish it was available a desktop application though. Such an app could gather information from multiple sources (including companion mobile apps) and maybe even location-aware social networks. It's useful on a mobile phone but i would rather buy a dedicated gps device to track my progress as constant usage of gps on a phone will definitely decrease it's battery life. Also I really feel uncomfortable handling this kind of historical data to any sort of SaaS. I would definitely pay as high as $10 (or maybe even more) for something like that.

6ren 14y ago

Also a forensic tool, a personal blackbox.

Bankq 14y ago

Quick correction: the Chinese translation of supporting iCloud should be 即将支持iCloud, but not 即将支援iCloud

mrbogle 14y ago

Is there any way to get any existing data on the iphone into the app (preferably without too much pain)? I assume it's already logging my info: http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/ http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

EdgarVerona 14y ago

Great idea! Did you make that? Will there be an Android version?

charlieok 14y ago

I think this is cool, despite the fact that it will undoubtedly leave out some interesting experiences. However, it also serves as a visceral reminder of the kind of data being made available to third parties when using this type of app. It makes me want to create something similar which I and everyone else wishing to use it can then keep entirely to ourselves.