MapCodes: Sexier, More Useful QR Codes

WOW! World of Fourcraft

What do you get when you combine the mystical World of Warcraft with Foursquare?

World of Fourcraft uses the Google maps API and Foursquare to transform New York into a huge, WOW-inspired, multi-player strategy game fueled by check-ins. New Yorkers: declare your allegiance to a borough today!

As it’s well-put by Mashable, “the nerdverse might just explode.”

Via Mashable

McDonald’s Pong

Pick n’ Play is an interactive OOH game that allows users to play Pong against each other on a digital billboard from their mobile devices. It’s a web-based not application so it doesn’t require a download – hooray for cross platform! It also geo-validates you, providing “winners” with a McDonald’s coupon to redeem.

Contributed by Jeremy Adirim

MondoWindow

Wish you could see what you’re flying over while you’re in the air? The site MondoWindow (still in beta) allows you to enter your flight information and access a bunch of data about the place you’re currently flying over.

Via Laughing Squid

Randomized Street View

With Map Crunch, one click transports you to a random 360° Google street view snapshot of somewhere in the world.

BBC Dimensions

Picture what things would look like if they happened somewhere else on the map with the BBC’s Dimensions.

via flavorwire

Interactive Music Videos

Broken Bells and Arcade Fire recently released interactive website experiences as music videos. Arcade Fire’s site is done as a Chrome Experiment showcasing the capabilities of HTML5. Broken Bells use Flash.

Goolery

Goolery is a collection of Google related projects from around the world:

Explore projects based on the Google tool used (e.g. Wave projects) or overall popularity.

Geography, Emotion, and Twitter

Twittermood is a project started by a multidisciplinary group of researchers from Northeastern and Harvard that seeks to understand the relationship between mood and geography through complex Tweet analysis.

In analogy to individual neurons firing together to add up to the human consciousness, the billions of tweets have meaningful macro-states that contain information about the whole system rather than the individual tweeters. But we need to do a little data mining to extract meaningful information about these states, to expose our collective states of mind.
(Sune Lehmann via Complexity and Social Networking Blog)

This poster summarizes the team’s findings thus far:

As part of the project, they created the following tvideo, documenting a 24-hour mood cycle on Twitter:

A wonderful translation of myriad data points into something insightful.

TagWhat: Social, Location-Based Augmented Reality Network

Released last week by Iryss, TagWhat is a web interface and mobile app that enables users to create their own AR networks:

Tagwhat users place digital tags anywhere on the Earth, from their street corner to another continent. By simply holding up the camera view of a mobile device (iPhone or Android), geo-contextual tags from pre-selected friends and community members become visible. Walk down the street and Tagwhat reveals a wealth of relevant information, discussions, and deals — such as a coupon for a nearby establishment, a discussion thread for a meet-up with friends, and a restaurant review about a sushi place around the corner.

At the heart of the Tagwhat network is its patent-pending augmented reality technology that lets users leave behind digital crumbs (tags) for any location, place or thing, anywhere in the world for friends and followers to discover. Each marker is an interactive social object, and can include direct action links to email, phone, SMS, photos, URL’s, cross-posting to Twitter, Facebook, and more.
(via PitchEngine)

It appears that the app is available now for iPhones and Android devices.

One effect of this technology for brands: it is becoming easier and easier to curate experiences of physical space (e.g. a tour or a scavenger hunt) using pre-existing tools; TagWhat maps can be created and dynamically amended with no outside assistance from developers. Awesome.