GEOCACHING: ANDROID APPLICATION FOR SOCIAL AND OFFLINE GEO-CHASING

Abstract

Geo-caching is a location based activity. The purpose of geo-caching is to find the hidden GPS (Global Positioning System) chips. These chips are placed in a water proof container which also contains a log book. Geo-caching website contains all the information of hidden GPS chips. User starts discovering chips using hints provided by geo-caching site or they can find by using navigations and compass etc. When a user finds chip, he can add information to log book and put geo-cache back in its original position. Geo-caching is a pretty popular activity and almost 2 million geo-caches are hidden around the world. In this project we have worked on android programming. User just needs to have an android based smart phone. This application facilitates the user to use the navigator in smart phones which will be used to locate the geo-caches on the map and provides the list of geo-cache. You can view its details and can search a specific geo-cache by its id and name. On the other hand we have provide a website on which user can share his/her experience online with other members. To play geo-chasing game user has to search or select a geo-cache which (s)he wants to discover. Then our app will navigate him/her to find that geo-cache. When (s)he finds that geo-cache there is a log book placed in geo-cache. User will take it out and get a unique code written on that log book and add this code in his/her profile. The features which make our project superior to other projects are social geo-caching and offline geo-caching. In social geo-caching user can share their experience by posting on their profile as well as on other member’s profiles, use can also make events. This helps users to hunt a same geo-cache at same time. And the other thing is offline geo-caching. The availability of internet is supposed to be a basic requirement to play this game but unavailability of internet is the major problem of developing countries. So we have embedded the offline support to the system which means that user can play this without the use of internet. If users have no internet facility they can send us id of a particular geo-cache in SMS. Our SMS sever will reply the coordinates of that geo-cache. User will enter that coordinates into our map and see the location of geo-cache and hunt it without the use of internet.