Note: The experimental Wanderlust platform is no longer publicly accessible online.
Imagine a book that could tell stories tailored to your location – stories that take you from cafes to libraries to museums, not just in one city, but wherever you are in the world. We’ve made that book, and we call it Wanderlust.
Wanderlust is an experimental mobile storytelling platform that works on all smartphones including iPhones, Android, and WebOS. Using a simple web-based editing interface, writers can create stories that move readers from location to location – but unlike previous location-based stories, these locations aren’t fixed. Act 1 of a story could require readers to be in a cafe – any cafe in the world; and Act 2 could take place in any bar in the world.
It’s not just location-based – it’s atmosphere-based storytelling.
The Stories
Wanderlust isn’t just a tech demo though – we invited award-winning writers including Naomi Alderman, Andrea Phillips, Tom Chatfield, and Alex Butterworth to explore what’s possible when you bring storytelling out of books and devices, and into readers’ environments.
You can read the stories by visiting Wanderlust on your smartphone – and by having a walk. And if you’d like to write a story, just tweet us @wanderlustapp!
How it Works
Wanderlust combines the GPS feature of smartphones with Foursquare’s database of venues to determine whether readers are in the right type of place to continue the story – and if not, to help guide them to the nearest cafe (or bar, or museum, or shop…).
We’ve created Wanderlust as a web-based app, meaning that readers can access stories without installing anything. Thanks to JQuery Mobile, Wanderlust is also fully compatible with a wide range of smartphones including iOS, Android, WebOS, and any other standards-compliant mobile browser. In fact, Wanderlust even works on any modern computer browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.
Credits
- Producer: Adrian Hon
- Developer: Ernesto Jiménez
- Writer: Matt Wieteska
- Graphic Designer: Estee Chan