On Valentine’s Day, one month ago, the Nseries Innovations Newsdesk posted a competition to win an N79 Active, which is the Polar bluetooth heartrate monitor equipped version of the Nokia N79 that Ricky reviewed earlier. What you had to do was use SportsTracker to track a heart-shaped exercise, then upload it to the SportsTracker online and share it with the Location Artists group.
I had totally forgotten about this competition until 2 days ago when I decided to check it out to see who won and found out that the competition was still open, so I decided to try my luck. I went into Google Maps on the computer, and spent over 3 hours looking for something that could resemble a heart in the streets of Paris. My original plan was to do something near the Eiffel Tower but I failed to find a decent route there. That was until I found two streets that had the exact shape of the top of a heart and all was solved. I printed the map, manually drew my plan, and yesterday tackled the mission with the help of my friend.
We walked for a bit more than an hour, going up and down through roads, trying to avoid straying away from the original plan while crossing the streets… My friend was all amazed seeing the heart take form on the SportsTracker application on my phone as we progressed. And I gotta admit that I felt very Stavros’ish (by the way, where is Stavros? I miss him!) trying to make position art and all.
Here is the final drawing: it’s an N79 holding a heart-shaped kyte (straight line), you can also see the long dangling cord from the kyte. We started our walk on the bottom of the dangling cord (where the 1. icon is) , and you can see that for the first half of the journey (cord and right side of the heart), the location was pretty inaccurate making it look like I walked on buildings while I was simply walking straight on the street. The second half (left side of the heart and N79) is much more accurate and it made me wish I had more time to re-do it all.
All in all it was a very exciting experience, even though the weather was very foggy, and we ended up discovering new places in Paris that we didn’t know about. I don’t know if I’ll win the N79 Active or not, I just know that I’m pretty happy about the final result and that I’m considering doing more position art in the future. What about you? Have you tried to do a position art before? What results did you come up with?
