I am going to go out on a limb and make my predictions for what I think we will see in the world of geocaching for 2016. Hopefully in about 366 days from now (it’s a leap year) I will have some of these right. Either that or I will be able to laugh uproariously at my complete ineptitude. These predictions are what I see happening in the sport obsession game of geocaching and do not necessarily have anything to do with my plans for caching in 2016.
- Challenges – will be back after the moratorium with their own icon and will require some type of automated checker like the one being used by project-gc currently.
- USA’s first GIGA – will occur in Denver this summer. I am allowing my personal hopes to cloud this one but that’s OK because this is my list
- Wherigo – will either get a significant tech overhaul (or go away)
- Permission – bomb scares and legal issues will cause groundspeak to tighten the restriction on cache owners actually obtaining permission to place caches.
- App updates – the old ($10) geocaching app by groundspeak will all but disappear as new improvements are made to the “Intro” app
- Virtual Reality – or augmented reality will emerge and fail in the geocaching market. Many geeks, including me, are dying to see what will happen when the augmented reality folks jump into geocaching but I say we are just not there yet and this year it will fizzle
- Gadget caches – we will see an explosion of gadget caches, or at the least higher quality caches this year. I think we are slowly reaching critical mass for fire and forget cachers and cachers. I believe we will see a the trend start to swing back the other way. Again, this may be clouded by my own hopes but – my list.
- Periscope – or another video broadcasting service will rise in popularity and then level off. The rise will be due to more services like AppleTV getting on board. The level off will be because our game tends to attract many more loners than extroverts.
- 1 Million in USA – we wil see the 1 millionth geocache in the USA. Groundspeak will do a promotional bit for it but after all the hoopla it will end up being an LPC or at least a run of the mill traditional cache.
- 3 Millionth cache – we will also see the 3 millionth geocache placed in the world. This is not much of a surprise with our current rate of new caches but I am going to also predict where it will be. I am calling it now – Germany.
- New Event Icon – my last one, I think Groundspeak will create a new type of event this year to replace the block party. I have no idea what this will look like but I just can’t imagine that they will leave a Block Party shaped void.