20 Day Stranger

Thanks to social media and smart phones we share our personal lives with complete strangers via curated feeds of Instagram and Facebook and the endless blogs citing what we have eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner - overloading the information about our lives and the lives of others, but in an attempt to create a more emphathetic approach to how others live their lives the new  20 Day Stranger app shares a persons live with a stranger for 20 days. Developed by Playful Systems, a research group at the MIT Media Lab and the Dalai Lama Centre for Ethics and Transformative Values, it is designed for the iPhone and reveals intimate, shared connections between two anonymous individuals offering up a mobile experience that exchanges one person's experience of the world with another's, while preserving anonymity on both sides.

Information is collected during the day using GPS and then images are collated from the internet to support what and where the user has been and these are then sent to the users app. Using Google Images and the likes of Foursquare, strangers will see the way you walked to work and your favourite cafe, but the actual locations and the identity of the user remains anonymous.

http://vimeo.com/92930928