This App Will Take You To Unexpected Places

With us staying home for many weeks, we've gotten bored due to the lack of variety in our everyday lives. As the same things happen day in and day out, it's only normal for us to desire something new… and something random, and that’s what this app, called Randonautica, is all about: taking us into random places.

Randonauting is… simple. You can do it using the free app Randonautica, which asks you for your location, prompts you to select one of a handful of different “entropy” generators—which one you choose should not really matter—and then asks you to focus your mind on your “intent.” Then it spits out a set of coordinates that could, allegedly, be influenced by your mind interacting with the machine, or not, and you can choose to go there, or not, and submit a report of what you find, or not. (You can generate 10 sets of coordinates a day for free and pay to generate more.) The app’s logo, fittingly, is an owl, because owls see in the dark; randonauts see what other people don’t. In particular, they see what they otherwise wouldn’t.

Through these months, this app has led people to weird, if not creepy, places such as abandoned houses and quiet forests. Aside from that, it has led people to disgusting objects such as water bottles filled with pee, and horrifying discoveries such as a suitcase containing corpses.

With its rather strange gimmicks, the app was downloaded 6 million times since the beginning of April.

The allure of Randonautica is bigger than “It allows me to be outdoors and kill time,” however. It is janky-looking, sure, and does not always load. And the science behind it—the idea that human thoughts can influence random-number generators—does not make a lot of sense. But it plays with concepts that people tend to love: that we can do something amazing whenever we feel like it, that the universe will talk to us if we try to listen, and that randomness can be tamed if we have a good attitude and a clear mind.