App Review: Field Trip

Field Trip was recently released by Google and is your guide to the hidden, cool, and unique places around you. Field Trip is a non-invasive app that will run in the background and when you near a location or point of interest, it will pop up a card that can show you more details about it. You can fine tune field trip to only show you the information that you want to see, and when you walk, drive, or travel near the places that may interest you Field Trip lets you know. You can then further personalize your results by giving each recommendation either a "Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down" to tell Field Trip what you like. 

Lets get started setting it up!

We are greeted with a nice canvas looking background and tap on the arrow to proceed.

Field Trip starts by asking us how often we want notifications. This can be very hard on your battery as it will awake itself quite often to check where you are in order to show the cards, so choose carefully. Of course you can always change your preference in the settings later.

Now we are greeted with a map that should show where you are (assuming your location settings are on)
If there are any points of interest around you they will also pop up. I will be taking us to Chicago because my home town only has 1 point of interest and is very boring.

Here we are zoomed in by The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and you can see quite a few cards are here. I am going to be traveling to Chicago later this month so I will be able to see some more of these features as I am there. But for now lets focus on a virtual tour.

Lets select this card here, up near the top of the screen. It is a card for "Shoreland Hotel, Main Lobby"

By clicking on the screen we are then taken to the information page of this hotel and we can either thumbs up or down the hotel, we can share it through a variety of different apps or we can change our notification settings.

Lets back out of that screen and clock on a blue card. The one just south of the Museum will do fine. It is a Movie Location for "The Blues Brothers, 1980" It tells us that this is the bridge that some "ineffectual Stormtroopers are dumped" here how exciting...

Anyway for my final thoughts, this app has a great bit of potential! It can really bring up some interesting things that not many other people may know about. But there is also a lot of junk wade through. You need to make sure to tailor your settings to exactly what you want, otherwise you will be barraged by cards that have nothing to do with your interests.

Link: Download