Adventures in Randonauting

I T t became the unexpected socially-distant app craze of last year’s summer lockdown, but so-called ‘Randonauting’ soon revealed a dark side. There’s nothing new in mobile gadget fads, from the mid-1990s when Tamagochis were all the rage to the recent Pokemon Go craze, which saw people flocking to random locations using Augmented Reality (AR) to track down sought-after ‘pocket monsters’. The latest app to capture the attention of younger users is Randonautica, with those pursing the ‘hobby’ described as ‘Randonauts’.

Randonauting is based on the use of a mobile phone app which directs users to visit randomly generated co-ordinates near them. If you’re looking to shake up your walking routine, this is an ideal way of exploring areas you’d normally go nowhere near. The free Randonautica app works by allowing the user to define the radius within which they’re willing to explore; then, drawing upon a ‘quantum random number generator’, the app highlights location co-ordinates within this set radius.

The app is the creation of 29-year-old former circus performer Joshua Lengfelder. In January 2019 in a fringe science group on Telegram he came across the.