Geeks are not particularly fond of the outdoors in general but it is good for us to get outside once in a while. Here are four apps that might inspire us to take a walk.

Geocaching

Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or mobile device and other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers, called “geocaches” or “caches”, anywhere in the world. You can find caches anywhere. There is probably less than a half a mile from you right now. There are many, many third party geocaching applications but I guess the one to get right now is the free app from Groundspeak Inc. the owners of Geocaching.com. Geocaching.com is the biggest repository of geocaches online.

Three Games from Niantic

Niantic, Inc. is a software development company spun out of Google as an independent entity in October 2015, soon after Google’s announcement of its restructuring as Alphabet Inc. There are three popular apps from Niantic:

Field Trip, an augmented reality tour guide that shows you photos of landmarks as they were in the past. It also gives you some history of the landmark.

Ingress is an augmented-reality massively multiplayer online location-based game. The game-play consists of capturing “portals” at places of cultural significance, such as public art, landmarks, monuments, etc., and linking them to create virtual triangular “control fields” over geographical areas.

Pokémon GO the newest game from Niantic involves walking around capturing  Pokémons, help them to evolve then fight them in the Gym against others. I’ve only just started these so I don’t know what is involved in the Gym fights. I am told there are a lot of things you will learn as the game progresses.