It’s not your fault if the title seems to make no sense. Today’s post ended up seeming like an ideal kind tribute to a fine man and icon of the bike community, a guy who’s keeping it real in a virtual world.
If you haven’t heard, there’s a badass new computer virus doing the rounds out there. It’s called Flame. Don’t panic yet. According to NPR’s Marketplace, it’s so far only located in the Middle East. It is however, a little interesting, in that it can steal pretty much all the information on your computer. That means keystrokes, screen captures–it can even listen in on your microphone and detect Bluetooth devices near your computer.
Pretty spooky, but it pales in comparison to the personal information gathering virus spreading through the outdoor community. It’s called Strava, and it wants to know how much you rode today.
Strava is far and away the most popular of a new group of physical performance social networks and data gathering applications. Using smartphones and Garmins, Strava records the data on your rides–distance, elevation, etc.–then lets you see just how much you suck compared to the really fast people out there.
It’s actually extremely cool–a social network that involves doing something more than just sitting in front of your computer. What’s always seemed a little odd to me, though, is that we often tend to be OK with volunteering personal information we’d otherwise think twice about giving away if asked. In nerd-speak the term for encouraging people to do something in exchange for some perceived reward is called “gamification.” Really, it means taking the mechanics of a video game and applying it to social interactions and real life, whatever the hell that is.
It has a lot of interesting potential–and some weird examples, like Zombies, Run! an iPhone app (arrives on Android June 14th), that encourages you along on your training runs by, well, telling you brain-thirsty zombies are chasing you.
Between the social element of apps like Strava and the interactive element of apps like Zombies, Run!, it seems like maybe I won’t be telling my grandkids to turn off the video games and go outside; I’ll be telling them to take the dumbass goggles off and just ride their bikes.
Google, in fact, is already building those virtual reality goggles. If you’ve not yet seen the glasses that can take photos and shoot video and do smartphony sorts of things, you should check them out.
Here’s what they look like on you if you’re a model:
And here’s what they look like on you if you’re not:
And here’s how rad your life looks while wearing them:
Have you ever noticed that Google’s a little like the world’s first Giant Spoiled Multinational Corporate Seven-year-old Suburban Kid. Apple has the iPhone and a viable retail manufacturing business, so Google wants virtual reality glasses and a viable retail manufacturing business. Thing is, this is good business practice in the tech sector in 2012. There are no more small innovations left. Everything from here on out will be a game-changer. Until nobody knows what the game is anymore.
For my part, I hope you can ride your bike while being chased by zombies and shooting eyeball laser beams at virtual riders just in front of you on the trail, obliterating their record breaking times and making a little pop-up appear on their own Google glasses to let them know they’ve just been vaporized.
More than likely, though, I’d be one of the last people riding a bike without any of that stuff, swerving around a trailhead full of dudes making “bweeel, bweeel!” laser beam shooting sounds and screaming “No, no!” at imaginary zombies. But I guess witnessing that would be way better than virtual reality anyway.
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