What About Wherigo? Where Did It Go?

This article was originally published on Cache Up NB. It has been mirrored here for archive purposes only.

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.