Author: OpenCaching North America

Last week, in part one of our interview with the creators of the Geolocation game Sighter, we were introduced to Attila Szaló and Krisztián Kusper, and learned a little about the development of the app and the game. Additionally, we learned a little about finding and creating Sights. In the highly anticipated part two, we will get into trails of sites, and a few closing odds and ends. And we do really mean highly anticipated, as part one one of the interview was one of the most viewed new posts on the blog in it’s first week of being posted. So read on!

OCNA Blog: Is there a proximity rule for creating individual Sights? For example, I was thinking of creating two Sights that are probably about 30 yards apart. Wouldn’t the “warm and hot zones” overlap?

Sighter: It’s better for the game and for other players if users don’t upload overlapping sights. We want you all to move around. 🙂 However, Overlapping sights don’t usually cause a problem as long as they’re about 30-40 yards apart. If a player is close to multiple sights one will probably appear as warm and the other as hot. This shouldn’t be a problem, as long as the sights are not identical of course. 🙂

Sighter is not like other geocaching apps. It’s focused on visual hints and visible treasures so it doesn’t cause problems even if some sights are very close together. In other words, even if warm and hot zones do overlap, the user still has to use/open his or her eyes.

OCNA Blog: There are individual Sights (Which we have explored the creation of), and Trails. How does a user string together a number of Sights in relatively close proximity, and create a trail? It appears that other users can add to an existing trail?

Sighter: At the moment it is not possible for users to create their own trails. We’re adding that functionality soon. It should be ready by the end of April. In the meantime, our programmers can create trails manually for any user who’d like them. To make our job easier, Android users should write the sequential ID numbers of the sights for the trail in the hint boxes of the individual sights. For example, if a user wants to make a trail for Oakridge Park they would write Oakridge1, Oakridge2, Oakridge3, etc. into the corresponding hint boxes. Then they should send us an email with a cover image (640×320 pixels) for the trail and of course the full name of the trail. After we have uploaded the trail, the user can edit the hints to whatever they want.

For iOS users there is no option to edit hint names at the moment, so instead of sending us Oakridge1, Oakridge2, Oakridge3, just send us the hints you have already written and the sequence of sights as you’d like to see them, e.g.

• Sight 1: Hint text = “Behind the rock”
• Sight 2: Hint text = “Moose heads”
• Sight 3: Hint text = “Red roof”

In terms of giving other users the ability to add new sights to an existing trail, this is an interesting question. There are certain complications, such as how it would affect the leaderboard, but in the long run we definitely want to support this feature.

OCNA Blog: On the finding side, finding nearest trails on the main menu, and the trail info page for each trail seems pretty straightforward. Then all the Sights on the trail will show up in the app similar to how they do for individual Sights. Do you have any special tips for users for the trails? We understand there is a leaderboard for each Trail?

Sighter: I realise your question is about finding sights within trails, but before we get to that we’d like to give your readers a few tips on creating trails. We advise users to keep the total walking time to around 1 hour and maintain a consistent distance between the sights. Please don’t include more than 25 sights per trail. Usually the best choice is a route starting and ending at the entrance of a location.

As for finding sights within trails, if your aim is relaxation then take your time to enjoy the surroundings and locate the sights at a leisurely pace. However, if seeing your name on the leaderboard is more important to you, then go as fast as you can because the leaderboard measures the total time taken to find all the sights with a trail.

OCNA Blog: You recently added the “quiz game for rainy days”, also known as “Couch Sighter”. Could you briefly explain how that works? I have access to an iphone and Droid, and it only appears to be on the Droid App at this time?

Sighter: Couch Sighter is a game where users are shown a random image captured by a Sighter user. The player is shown 4 possible locations where the photo was taken and they have to guess the right one, then another photo appears. The first version of Couch Sighter had no time limit per session and no maximum number of allowed mistakes. However, in the new version, which we released on Android on February 18th, users have 3 lives only. If they get “killed”, they have to start a new session. It’s much more challenging.
iPhone users needn’t worry, we’ll be bringing Couch Sighter to iOS soon, hopefully by mid April!

OCNA Blog: Speaking of the iphone app, it says in itunes that it’s “optimized for iphone 5”. Any major issues using it with a 4? Any similar issues for any Droids?

Sighter: The “optimized for iphone 5” text is inserted automatically by Apple. No need for concern, Sighter works on iPhone 4 and 4s too.

OCNA Blog: Will anyone ever catch up to Attilla on the Sights Created leaderboard? (1,741 created as of the date of this interview). 

Sighter: It’s not surprising that Attila has created so many sights, he is one of the founders after all. However, we hope someone eventually will catch up with him. In fact, we’re sure several fanatical users will overtake him by the end of the year. Hopefully, some of our future hardcore users will come from the ranks of your readership. In closing, we’d like to encourage your readers to create lots of sites. This isn’t like other apps where too many sights in one area can be problematic, so don’t be shy. Snap, snap and snap away to your heart’s content. 🙂

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Many thanks to Attila and Krisztián for the long interview, we appreciate it! Remember, Sighter is still in it’s Beta phase, so you can get in on the ground floor right now. If there are no Sights in your area, create some, and watch the game grow. Again, you can visit their website at www.sightergame.com where there are links to the download pages for Droid and ios. By the way, we at OpenCaching North America are working on Sighter attributes you can add to your cache pages, but our graphic artist is currently indisposed. Watch for that in the future on our site.

Sighter is a geolocation smartphone game for iphone and Android billed as a social, outdoor treasure hunting activity, where you can hide and seek interesting Sights, simply by taking and sharing photos. Think of these photos as virtual Geocaches, or Sights. To find a Sight, just download the app, open it up, and you will see the closest Sights, with their distances and direction displayed, as well as a compass arrow. The goal is to find these sights, and take a photograph of it as proof of your find.

The creators of Sighter were featured on The UK Geocaching Podcast Show #24, November 2013 and on The GeoGearHeads Podcast Episode #106, January 11th, 2014. We here at the OCNA Blog figured we’d contact them to see if they were interested in a print interview, to which they graciously agreed. This is the first part of a two part interview.

Nearest Sights Screen

OCNA Blog: We understand you’re from Budapest, Hungary, but are currently living in Santiago, Chile?

Sighter: Attila Szaló and Krisztián Kusper are the founders of Sighter. They met at university in Budapest. They are both Hungarians. Attila is in Santiago, Chile now because 6 months ago Sighter won a place in StartupChile, which is a program funded by the Chilean state.

In a nutshell, participating startups in the program receive equity free funding of 40 K USD. One of the stipulations is that at least one founder must relocate to Chile for the duration of the program. There were 1,570 applications from 28 countries for Startup Chile VII and Sighter was one of the 100 selected participants.

OCNA Blog: How long have you been Geocaching? Do you primarily use Geocaching.com, Geocaching.hu, or both?

Sighter: We’ve all played around with Geocaching.com and Geocaching.hu although the founders are not exactly hardcore geocachers. However, we’re delighted and thankful that the geocaching community is embracing us and helping us to get the word out.

OCNA Blog: The Official Sighter video (below) is great, and very professionally done. Who’s that girl? Was the whole video shot in Berlin?

Sighter: Indeed, who is THAT girl?? 🙂 That’s the first question everyone asks us. 🙂 Her name is Gabi and she’s a Hungarian actress. The entire video was shot in Berlin by a friend of ours, Matyás Kálmán.

OCNA Blog: You mention that you’ve received some Venture Capital or “Seed” funding for the Sighter project. There was more on top of that?

Sighter: Last year Sighter participated in the Propeller Venture Accelerator, which is a prestigious 3-month accelerator program in Dublin.We received 30,000 EUR in funding as well well as mentoring and business development assistance. Sighter also received further modest investment from the Enterprise Ireland Competitive Startup Fund. 

OCNA Blog: When did the app become available for Android? How about ios? Any plans for Windows Phone? (The blogger is a Windows Phone user).

Sighter: An early prototype of the app has been available on iOSsince last March and on Android since September. As for Windows phone, we’re certainly interested in developing one. However, it’s a questions of allocating resources.

Home Screen

OCNA Blog: Sighter is still in Beta of course, but you currently support only Hungarian and English? How many languages do you plan on supporting? Are you looking for user help in translations?

Sighter: There are currently localized versions of Sighter in Spanish, Hungarian and German (we have a very active German community). The German and Spanish versions (on Android only for now but coming soon to iOS) were translated by local users, so we’d welcome more user translation help in the future for sure.

French, Chinese and Korean are part of our roadmap too. Right now it’s a question of prioritising our time and rolling out new features before we can really focus on language localization more.

OCNA Blog: Any other future plans for the app while it’s in beta that you can share with us? Is a website for the game (with profiles, leaderboard statistics, maps of sites etc..) a high priority in the future?

Sighter: Everything in your question is on the list. The next update will see maps and next week we begin private testing of push notifications for Android, i.e.notify me if someone follows me, finds one of my sights, likes my sight, comments on my sight, etc. There will be a staged rollout of push notifications, the first of which you’ll start seeing in about 4-5 weeks.There’s also a big update for iOS coming soon with social features, sight-maps, new languages and the new iOS look.

OCNA Blog: We’ve given an overview of how to find individual sights in the introduction to this blog post, and it’s shown in the video. Is creating your own Sights easy? I understand you can set up a secret message, or show the finder a bonus photo?

Sighter: Absolutely, creating sights is as easy as snapping a photo. You just have to push one button and Sighter takes care of the rest. Users can add texts, hints and even secret secondary photos at any time afterwards by using the edit function.

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That is certainly nice to hear! The Blogger is going on a multi State vacation in about 7 weeks, and the ability to later edit your Sight would be a well needed feature. Sure, I can snap a picture of something interesting in say Virginia, for example, but not being a local, chances are I’m not going to know very much information about it, and will have to research the object later on the internet. Well, thanks to Sighter for the interview. As we said, it’s part one of a two parter, we will delve more deeply into creating Sights for others to find, amongst other things, next week. You can find them on the web at http://www.sightergame.com, and of course there are links to Google Play and the ios App store. Be sure to check back here for part two of the interview!