Overview: Your mimob
mimob is a simple application that incorporates game mechanics on top of the location-based application Foursquare, with the goal of providing accelerated visual feedback on a users daily-life decisions. If you are the user, a mimob is your avatar, male or female. Your mimob’s overall health is determined by three key attributes, Mind, Body and Spirit. The central premise behind this application is that your real world actions, or decisions, can be approximately deduced by your physical location. Hence, your mimob learns of your daily decisions based on your ‘check-ins’ on Foursquare. Its Mind, Body, and Spirit attributes are affected accordingly based on the type of check-in.
Premise: What makes mimob unique?
We all try to better ourselves with the help of a variety tools, apps, techniques and resources. However, the burden of effort is placed solely on ourselves. In a fitness tracking application, we are supposed to accurately record our activity and the application then gives us insights. But, how about, for a change, the application tells us what to do and when to do it? What if the application becomes our personal assistant, learns about us over time, and recommends, with increasing accuracy, actions for us to perform? What if our recommendations will not just be limited to our physical fitness, but our eating habits, our hobbies, our interests, and our aspirations?
mimob is built on this idea. This initial version primarily focuses on Mind, Body, and Spirit attributes and infers a user’s daily-life decisions based on their check-ins at various places. Subsequent versions of the application will recommend many more types of actions to a user, and with greater accuracy, also reflecting more granular personal, mental and emotional attributes.
We hope the user will be amused by visual game-like shock based micro-feedback upon each check-in (described further below), and adapt appropriate future behavior pertaining to that check-in/action. We also want to assert that our goal with mimob is never to judge or provide negative / detrimental feedback to the user, but instead to encourage them to gain valuable (and accelerated/instantaneous) feedback to enhance their daily actions.
Our long-term vision for mimob is to make it a user’s life-decision dashboard, accurately tracking user actions (as and when the user wants them tracked) and providing visual feedback and accurate recommendations, all with the same stickiness and excitement of game-mechanics. Our goal is to enable every user of mimob to Win at Life :)
Key Attributes: Mind, Body, Spirit
A mimob is governed by the following attributes: Body, Mind, and Spirit.
Each attribute governs at least one characteristic of the mimob. Attributes advance by checking-in to locations related to that attribute, and deteriorate through inactivity or checking into locations that are detrimental to the given attribute. All attributes rise and fall in rank based on point thresholds being met.
Body governs the mimob’s size. Size ranges from fat to slim.
Mind governs the mimob’s mood. Mood ranges from sad to happy.
Spirit governs the mimob’s glow. Glow ranges from dark to radiant.
Disclaimer:
"Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life."