Motive to Make Locative Media Better

If you've read more than one post here you would quickly come to the the conclusion that I love locative media (a.k.a. location-based services).

However, you'd be a bit wrong. I love the potential of these apps, but too often it is just potential. Existing apps are scratching the surface of possible interactions and experiences that mobile media can facilitate between people and their physical world. To give a cinematic analogy - if locative media were films, it would still be the silent era.

There are a lot of elements that need to be in place to build a killer locative media app. In addition to the standard user experience and technical proficiency factors, locative media developers need to be able to create interactions with a device's geopositioning abilities, incorporate online maps, and access or create a library of geocoded content. In my experience and in talking to developers, they spend a lot of development time working on getting these last elements working.

Having worked in digital media for many years now, I have found that when technical development is difficult or overly laborious, it often results in an organization's energies being focused on that - opposed to front-end elements such as creating an intuitive and pleasing user experience, offering sophisticated narrative or informational structures, promoting organizational or branding goals effectively, or differentiating itself from similar services, among other issues. Alternatively, technical hurdles can scare people off and prevent people from even trying their ideas.

I was contacted this summer by a company, RocketChicken Interactive, that is addressing the challenges locative media developers face. Naturally, my interest was instantly piqued. All the more so when I learned the company is based on Canada. Over the past couple months, I have had the chance to talk to company founder and president Ryan Chapman and senior executive Peter Wittig.

Their company has created several location-based games, such as the popular Code Runner. The game was a hit. But it was during their lengthy development process that the founders realized that there could be an easier way to do this. So they created Motive.

Motive offers a platform service for people to build and launch locative media applications from games to guides - without needing to know much code. This offers organizations the new ability to not only launch products more quickly, but ideally to focus their energies on innovating, differentiating themselves, and making killer new apps.

As Ryan states:

People are reinventing the wheel in the development of locative apps. They are struggling with the same technical obstacles and having to build everything from scratch. Motive gives you the programming mechanics so that you can focus on the story and the user experience. You can create a compelling experience without writing a lot of code. 

Through a web-based, authoring tool, Motive allows people to choose the types of interactions desired to build an app. You plug into an existing dataset of geocoded content, such as OpenStreetMaps or Foursquare, or use your own. Then, through Motive's visual interface, you choose from menu items to enable interactions with specific places or types of places in proximity to a user. So one could choose a piece of content to display when a user is near a specific restaurant, any restaurant, or a type of restaurant (Indian vs. Italian). Scenarios can be prioritized with conditional responses added in accordingly. Developers can also choose whether to make their app online or offline (and thereby avoid incurring roaming costs).

Another challenge that Motive addresses for organizations is that it can help reduce the silos between back-end and front-end. Ryan summarizes the problem:

Content producers are still kept at arm's length. For example, it could take a week to update a few words, but with Motive, the writers or graphic designers can work in parallel to the developers. We are injecting content into the pipeline using Motive's tools - content can be updated on the fly and be live instantly. 

As with a content management system, Motive can enable one's apps to be updated via their hosted web-based tool. Clients can upload their digital assets (e.g., design elements, images, music, videos) and content and update it as they wish without having to request a programmer to do it for them.

Although Motive was developed based on a location-based game, the notion of interacting with place is not confined to gamers. Museums, historic sites, tourist attractions, theme parks, and schools, among other businesses, may want to offer an app to direct, guide, or encourage play between their customers and their places.

Currently, the service does require some programming effort to launch an application, but Ryan notes,

The vision of Motive is for someone to be able to sit down and launch a locative app without writing a single line of code. If you are creative, then you won't be hamstrung by all that - you don't have to solve the problems over again and over again. Just take this and run with it. With that, I think there will be an explosion of apps. 

It is this vision that is so engaging. By opening up the sphere to those otherwise unable to code and overcoming herculean tech hurdles, more people and a more diverse variety of people will be able to try something out. To make this vision more of a reality, the company is working on offering a series of templates targeted to various types of businesses with associated interactions further facilitated.

Through their beta and alpha testing with Motive, Ryan has been surprised by some of the new things people are doing, as their testers have built options into their apps that he hadn't envisioned. The initial crop of locative media apps offered a lot of novelty, but check-ins, friend finding, and place reviews are rather limited forms of interacting with our world. I am excited at the possibility of seeing really sophisticated and innovative projects in this area. As Blogger did for blogs, I think Motive has the possibility to facilitate and spur some amazing developments in the locative media field.

Kid Reviews Mobile Game Tunnel Town

I have a guest blogger for today's post, my young daughter.  She recently discovered mobile app game by the maker's of National Geographic's Animal Jam that she loves! It's called Tunnel Town.

It's a free game available on Android and iPhones. 

As I type this she is getting a new a new bunny in the game for me  - it's Halloween themed (my fav holiday) and she's naming it after me.

Daddy Glenny the Pumpkin Bunny

Here is her review:

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I heard about Tunnel Town from an ad on Animal Jam a few months ago, and then a kid in my class talked about the game and then I remembered it. Then I felt like I wanted to try it, so my mommy downloaded it for me to our tablet. I thought it sounded cool and it is. It's good. R-e-a-l good!

The bunnies are from Jamma and they are dancing but then a phantom comes and takes them to Tunnel Town, a land where the bunnies have to learn to dig underground.

What you do in the game is get bunnies and make rooms underground and you can decorate or get things for the bunnies to do.


You start with a bunny and you can name your bunny. The first bunny I got I named is Alyssa. She is a Dust Bunny from the Desert. 

Alyssa in resting in her chair

Click on a bunny and if you want to find out about the type of bunny it is or where it is from. Then you can read more about it. You can also tell how much energy it has.

These are not real bunnies. They are just virtual ones. So like a squid bunny - they don't exist. They have really weird bunnies, like turtle bunnies, a cactus bunnies, chinchilla bunnies. There is even a sea-foam bunny. 

You can play with your bunnies. Bunnies can mine, dance, sleep. They jump and hop around on their own. They can fly using their ears too. If a bunny gets hungry or tired, they will tell you.

At the bottom of the screen is a camera button that takes a picture of Tunnel Town. That's how we got these pictures posted here.


You start with three garden plots. You get more plots as you level up. You can grow food for your bunnies to get energy.

The Garden Patch

Bunnies need energy so they can do their work. If you want them to dig they need food. If you want them to mine, they need food. Bunnies don't care what type of food it is, but some give them more energy than others.  Normal carrot seeds are free. You need gems or stars to buy other seeds. When the food is grown it glows and makes and a noise. I like growing food so the bunnies have lots to eat.

To get new bunnies or to decorate, you need to buy them with gems or stars. In the bunny tunnels are mines that the bunnies can work to get gems.

Bunnies hard at work mining gems for currency

They give you things to do and if you do them you get rewards. For instance, I had to get a kitchen set, which includes a stove, a kitchen sink, and a refrigerator. Or you might have to get a bathroom set.

Bunnies doing their bathroom business

You get new goals. When I first started I had one, but now I have 11 goals. You can also collect bugs and you can get rewards for doing that.


Bunnies go to the dance floor to breed babies. It can be any two bunnies that are level four and up. It is a mystery what kind of bunny you will get. You can also adopt bunnies by going to the store and buying one. I like to buy bunnies more because I can choose what bunnies I get.

Bunnies looking at each other

I made rooms for the bunnies based on the colour of their fur. Each room I want them to have a rug, a bed, and an accessory (a clock or a stool).

A Bunny-of-Paradise named after my mom

You put the bunnies into the bed and they go to sleep. They curl up and make cute snoring sounds and there will be zzzs. That's how they get energy.

Sunny the Cactus Bunny sleeping her bedroom

 Usually when I go I like to put them to bed or in a chair to be polite to them.

Sometimes it is really hard to find bunnies as they wander around wherever they want, so you have to search for them.

I like this better than Animal Jam because you can do everything without paying. I also think it is really cute how they have weird and adorable bunnies. It's easy to use. Most of all, it is a lot of fun!