20 Day stranger app that lets you experience life as a stanger
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It is an incredible way to experience life in another country or culture - without ever having to look away from your phone.
Researchers at MIT have unveiled a new app designed to let people assume the virtual life of another for 20 days.
The social experiment keeps the identities of both parties secret, but reveals where they go and what they do.
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The software uses the iPhone¿s sensors to collect very exact information from GPS and other methods.
HOW IT WORKS
The software uses the iPhone's sensors to collect information on movements.
It then uses online services to create a virtual version of the world you move through, and shows it to your match.
For instance, if you're walking in Paris, the app will tell your partner that you're walking and then will accompany it with Google Street View data pulled from a half-mile radius.
It also uses Foursquare for data on locations.
At the end of the experiment, each person has one chance to send a message to the other--either to say goodbye, or to exchange contact information if they like.
'We started by thinking, could we make some piece of software that allows you to be connected to strangers in a way that produced empathy instead of suspicion, contempt, or disdain?' Playful Systems director Kevin Slavin explains.said Kevin Slavin, director of MIT Media Lab's Playful Systems research group, which developed the app along with MIT's Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values.
'We wondered, how can we open up a window to your and a stranger's life in such a way that it produced curiosity and interest?' he told Fastco.
'20 Day Stranger is an iPhone app that reveals intimate, shared connections between two anonymous individuals,' the team say.
'It's a mobile experience that exchanges one person's experience of the world with another's, while preserving anonymity on both sides.
The app uses services such as Google Maps and foursquare to give strangers a feeling that they are walking in the virtual steps of a person.
'For 20 days, you and a stranger will experience the world in your own way, together.
'You'll never know who it is or exactly where they are, but we hope it will reveal enough about someone to build your imagination of their life... and more broadly, the imagination of strangers everywhere.'
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