It’s like google maps or any other GPS kinda thing, except that the map starts out blank. You reveal places on the map as you travel to them (maybe with kind of a fog of war effect) and those places stay revealed forever. Maybe you can customize the reveal radius to your liking.
There could be another setting for a “speed cap”. If you go above a certain speed (like… 15 mph?) the app stops revealing what’s around you for however long (maybe 30 minutes idk), meaning that you can’t reveal more of the map by car. The point of the app wouldn’t really be navigation so you probably wouldn’t want anyone to use it in a car anyways.
Uh, speaking of the point of the app… It occurred to me how much I like filling out maps in games, and how much surface area of the Earth I never visit or see even if it’s around where I live. Sometimes I’ll take a wrong turn and end up on a street that’s been there all along that I’ve never been on before and it’ll kinda blow my mind a little bit.
This app would encourage exploration, not because it’s “good” necessarily, but just because… I don’t know. Because it might be fun? Because it might be “good”? Because nothing else does encourage that?
And with that speed cap feature, it would also encourage actually walking to fill out the map. Maybe that’d provide extra motivation to exercise! I have no idea
I really like this idea a lot, but I have trouble saying why. It isn’t very useful, and in fact the very premise of it makes it less useful… I like that it inherently promotes curiosity, though. And maybe while you’re exploring you’ll see a lovely dog or a cute cat or a pretty plant or something, and you never saw them before because you never had any reason to be there.
… I doubt I’ll actually make this but I still wanted to share it, because I like it and I think other people might also like it.
Scrapped feature: Unlockable fast travel waypoints. Turns out these are outside of our budget and also the scope of human technology :(
