Growing up in a beautiful place makes you take a lot of things for granted. I live in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and it’s strange to me how many people visit the area just to look at the lakes, forests, and waterfalls. Can’t they find many of the same things just by walking out their own back doors?
I’ve come to realize that’s the wrong question. Instead of asking why millions of people make the trip to the place where I live, I should be asking why I’m not taking advantage of the beautiful world that surrounds the place where I keep the many Internet-connected screens by which I’ve surrounded myself.
Two apps, the all-but-identically named Wonders and Wander, both want to use those screens to inspire homebodies like me to explore the world around them. Both are based on the idea that people don’t get outside often enough; they differ mostly in how they’ve decided to get those people off their asses.
Screenshot from Wonders mobile app, which shows off one of the user stories that accompanies the photography.
Wonders chief executive Martin Ahe compares his app to a mobile magazine. It features images from professional travel photographers, and an update released today allows consumers to order professional prints of those images, with the photographers receiving a small portion of the resulting revenues.
Ahe wants Wonders to “take urbanites, get them to nature, and get them to live a little bit more compassionately and be more connected with nature.” The idea is to make these people happier, healthier, and more interested in preserving a world teetering on the brink of environmental crisis, he says.
Wonders is organized around the content contributed by photographers, but Ahe says the company has never paid anyone whose images have appeared in the app. Giving them a slice of the revenues drawn from people buying prints is supposed to be a way for the company to help support those contributors.
Those photographers have shared images from the Scottish Highlands and United States national parks to British Columbia and the Arctic Circle. Ahe says the idea is that sharing these images will get people to spend more of their time outdoors, whether it’s in places like this or in their own back yards.
He dismisses the idea that the shoots might intimidate people without the means to visit the places they depict. “This is a very standard sort of excuse,” he says. “‘Oh, I’m just not outdoorsy enough, not fit enough, I don’t have the right gear.’ It’s very easy to come up with excuses not to do stuff like that.”
Wonders tries to accommodate people who lack those means by including less intense photos. “Most of [Wonders’ content] is celebrating people who just take a car, or a bike, or a truck, and just go in any direction and find whatever feels good,” Ahe says. “Adventure like that is already good enough.”
Still, an app populated with images from people traveling around areas that most people won’t visit in their lifetimes doesn’t offer a lot of guidance as to what those people can do without breaking the bank. That’s where Wander, which was also created to inspire wanderlust in its users, might come in.
What to do once you’re outside
Despite their shared fixation on the outdoors, Wander couldn’t be more different from Wonders. It’s a side project from two developers, not a startup that went through TechStars Austin; it’s based on user-generated content, not contributions from professionals; and it doesn’t bill itself as a magazine.
A shot of some possible things to do in your area from Wander’s iOS app.
Wander instead focuses on allowing people to track their hikes, collect whatever images they took during their trek, and share the entire thing as a mapped-out journey that anyone can follow. It’s less like a travel publication and more like a combination of existing hiking-tracking apps and Instagram.
“We wanted to let people tell the full story of their adventure,” says Wander co-creator Timothy Sakhuja. This would in turn “help people more easily discover things that excite them and hikes they want to go out and do — and they can do them, because they have a GPS trace associated with the journal.”
The app is pretty simple at the moment. Sakhuja says the team would like to add more features, such as integrations with existing hiking apps and a location-based feed, to the application when they have the opportunity. Right now Wander isn’t under any pressure to take on funding or monetize itself.
It might be unfair to compare these two applications. They’re quite different in terms of the companies behind them, their presentation, and the way they want to achieve their goals. But the goal is just about the same: Inspiring people to put their phone away for a moment to experience the natural world.
In the process, they might just teach people to appreciate what’s available to them. It certainly worked for me: In the time it took to test both these apps and ask questions of Ahe and Sakhuja, I found myself appreciating the place I live just a little bit more than I had in the past. That’s good enough for me.
Trouble exploring the great outdoors? These apps have a fix. originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.
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