November 2008 GGA Meeting Notes

The November 2008 GGA meeting was held in northwest Atlanta in Kennworth Park. The focus of the meeting was about the new “Wherigo” platform from Groundspeak. The very first Wherigo Geocache in Georgia was created in this park, so it was a great place to discuss the new game from Groundspeak.

Wherigo is a platform where people can use certain GPS devices or GPS enabled Pocket PC devices to create and play interactive games that are created using the “Wherigo Builder”. You can be taken to virtual locations by following the game created by the owner. You can also interact with virtual characters and you can even be given items and tasks during game play. Game play software is called a “cartridge”, and you download them from the www.wherigo.com web site. You can combine this with geocaching by creating a storyline, navigating people from one place to another to get clues and then combine these clues to lead to a final geocache site. It is like a multicache, but you can use your imagination to do so much more with it.

To play a cartridge, you use the Garmin Colorado or Oregon unit or a GPS Pocket PC with the Wherigo Player installed on it. As you play the cartridge, you will be directed to locations by following your GPS. You can see pictures on the devices and can even have sounds on the Pocket PC. LZ33 noted via email that you can use the Wherigo cartridge to take people on a tour of areas that don’t allow caches and into locations with a lot of people since the components are virtual ones. The person playing doesn’t have to be sneaky as they look for a small container while near non-cachers. You also don’t have to worry about parts of a multicache being stolen, so the Wherigo Geocache is easier to maintain. Interactivity, easier to maintain and more areas to play!

Before the meeting, a few people even got to go out and look for the Wherigo Geocache in the park as the cache owner tagged along. It was a lot of fun.

There were 30 returning members and 7 new members attending the meeting. Thanks to all that came out on a beautiful late fall day. You can see the event cache page here:

http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GC1HG9P