Making Use of Hybrid Space - The Geocaching Way

In Adriana De Souza E Silva’s essay “From Cyber to Hybrid – Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces” he discusses how the advancement in the technology of mobile phones has changed how we view cyberspace and how the lines between cyberspace and real life space are merging. We are no longer confined to desktop computers. We can now access the internet whenever we are, which brings our physical and digital space together, which he calls hybrid space.  On page 761, one of the examples he gives of this new hybrid space are games that combine virtual space and real life space. 
 
I think a good sample of hybrid space is Geocaching.  When geocaching, you download the coordinates of a container, called a cache, that usually contains an object, unless the cache is really small, in which case it will only have a slip of paper to sign your name.  To geocache, you need a mobile device that is GPS enabled, access to the internet for getting location clues and for logging in your finds, and the physical space where the objects are found.

So you have a game that combines both cyberspace and real life space and takes place all over the world. People take the objects they find in the caches and drop them off in the next cache they find. The objects are being tracked in cyberspace but are being physically moved in real life space and other people can track the movements of the caches they placed. It’s a game where the playing board is the whole world. And when you are searching for the next cache you don’t separate the cyberspace elements from the real life elements, both elements are required to make geocaching work and you go back and forth, from the internet to get the coordinates, to real life space to find the caches and back to the internet to track your finds.