Field Trip is a new smartphone app from Google which monitors your location and lets you know when there’s something interesting nearby. You can configure the app to vibrate your phone, play a ringtone, or even turn on the screen and read headlines to you using text-to-speech.
Or you can tell it to be quite and only display nearby attractions when you pull the phone out of your pocket.
The free app is available for Android, and coming soon to iOS.
When you first run Field Trip it will walk you through setup by asking, among other things, how frequently you’d like to see notices.
Once that’s done, you can start browsing architecture, food, public art, and other items in your neighborhood without even leaving the house or office. Just check out the map or nearby tabs.
You can also customize the information sources Field Trip will use. Don’t like to see items from Inhabitator the Food Network? Just uncheck the appropriate boxes.
This kind of location-aware notification seems like the sort of thing Google would build into the Google Now service for Android 4.1. But instead of popping up as Google Now cards, Field Trip notes appear in their own app which is constantly running in the background.
I feel this would have been so much better if it were part of Google Now. Google is always releasing similar products to stuff they already have.