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Toolbox: Wikihood Rules Everything Around You
h4. Hey sailor, welcome to Toolbox. This is the place where Motherboard’ll be telling you every week about this or that bit of software that you really need to have on your computer or phone-computer now. Requirements for something to be in our toolbox...
Wikihood is a simple but super powerful-feeling augmented reality app that has nothing to do with augmented reality in the adding-digital-information-to-real-time-images sense. It’s simple: it takes your current location via your phone’s GPS and gives you a list, ordered by proximity, of Wikipedia articles about things around you—that school that used to be a major train station or how one of the leading physicists of last century used to live around the corner from my office. The net result is a secret history of wherever you are.I’d say Wikihood is indispensable for exploring, but that’s not quite it: it turns everything everywhere into exploration. If you want it. This is maybe one of the top five apps on my phone—you can’t even imagine the kind of goddamn know-it-all I am—and somehow it’s free.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.