A highly curated membership-based site offering specialized city guides and insider travel tips
While most online travel sites cater to the occasional trip goer looking to save money, Valet sets its sights on a more discerning clientele of creative professionals with a highly filtered list of hotels in select destinations worldwide. By specifically targeting—and hand picking—artists, designers, musicians and people of the…
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Unlock the secrets of NYC with an interactive guidebook and iPhone app
Anyone who grew up reading the Choose Your Own Adventure book series will delight in Italian publisher Whaiwhai‘s take on interactive storytelling. Part guidebook, part game, each book unlocks secrets to the city as you unravel the mystery page by page. The latest town to go under the microscope is New York, told by Big Apple aficionado Timothy Speed Levitch—star of the 1998 documentary The Cruise. Centered around a prosthesis with mystical powers, “The Pegleg” hits stores today, and is launching alongside an iPhone app that Whaiwhai is letting CH readers download for free.
Playing is simple, and both the book and app allow you to choose the length of your enigmatic adventure, from two to nine hours. As developer Tomas Barazza explains, the difference between the two is that the app will be for more social experiences. It will soon be updated to let players exchange messages between friends and see how many steps they have already solved when playing in challenge mode. The book, which relies on answering through text messaging, also allows for group play, but it is slightly less interactive because as Barazza says, it was designed during the “pre-iPhone era.”
Packed with historical information and tons of fun, the Whaiwhai books and now iPhone app are great for tourists looking for an offbeat adventure. To download the app, visit The Pegleg in iTunes, where it will be free today through midnight EST, and $6 after that. Pick up a copy of the book at Amazon or through IndieBound, and see more cities at WhaiWhai.
A petite guide to NYC’s secret “deep” history
Relatively innocuous and informative guidebooks exist for nearly every city on Earth. Generally alike in form and function, a good one tends to be a necessity in a foreign land but they rarely offer unique insight or dynamic perspectives. The new project from Smudge Studio and Friends of the Pleistocene literally goes deeper into one of the world’s most complex cities in a fresh way. Geologic City: A Field Guide to the Geoarchitecture of New York explains what may not be obvious about the Big Apple’s roots, going nearly back to the Big Bang.
Focusing on 20 different sites throughout the five boroughs, the guide explains various connections to geological history—from taxi paint to the sandstone and limestone walls protecting the Federal Reserve Bank’s stash of supernova-born gold. Another favorite fact is about the stone from Indiana adorning Rockefeller Center formed out of 340-million-year-old aquatic fossils.
The book is filled with a lot of interesting—and for the layman relatively obscure—information that gives the reader a new lens through which to view the urban landscape. In an age where human’s impact on the globe rivals that of massive geological forces (except at a much faster rate), it’s fascinating to examine the results of unimaginable swaths of time as they fit into and shape our surroundings. The book is available for pre-order, shipping 9 September 2011.
Discouraged by the bulk and complex origami of the traditional street map, industrial designer Emanuele Pizzolorusso created the malleable Crumpled City Map. Printed on Tyvek® and designed to fit into a small bag, this clever reinvention rids travelers of awkward large-scale city maps.
The durable Dupont™ Tyvek® material leads to a waterproof map that easily crumples to fit into the palm of a hand and can be quickly referenced in any climate.
Currently in production, Pizzolorusso hopes to release the maps soon, which will include London, Paris, New York, Tokyo and Berlin. See his website for more information.
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