You can now carry Brooklyn's backyard in your back pocket.
Prospect Park has unveiled an app to help visitors navigate the 585-acre green space on their iPhone or Droid.
The map-based app points visitors in the right direction when they're looking for a specific spot, and it's also intended to get people off the beaten path and exploring sections of the park they haven't seen before, said the Prospect Park Alliance vice president for public programs Maria Carrasco.
Most park visitors tend to stay near the entrance where they enter the park, Carrasco said, and the app was designed to guide people to new spots.
Park designers Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted intentionally designed the green expanse to help visitors escape the city by getting lost in nature.
Its paths can send visitors on "a lot of twists and turns," Carrasco said, which can lead to people getting a little lost. The app helps visitors explore, but find their way home.
“This is one of the great places in the city, where you could be 100 feet from the street but you don’t know it because the trees around you are muffling the noises and you’re in a beautiful nature experience," Carrasco said.
"The app can help enhance that experience by helping you go further into the park."
In addition to an interactive map, the app offers games and challenges that users can complete to win badges and prizes consisting of Prospect Park Alliance swag such as pencils and temporary tattoos.
The challenges can only be accessed when you're in specific areas of the park, a way to encourage users explore new areas.
Visitors can collect points by spotting specific species of birds or answering tough trivia questions. One asks what adjective George Washington used to describe the Maryland 400? It's a reference to a memorial in the park.
There are also "secret" challenges and games that users will get push notifications for when they walk past a specific spot in the park. The app also lets visitors track how much of the park they've explored.
One benefit of the phone-based map is that it provides "less intrusive wayfinding" than adding signage inside the park, which can mar the natural landscape, Carrasco noted.
"We're trying to encourage visitors to become more familiar with their backyard," Carrasco said. "It just happens to be a very large backyard with a 60-acre lake."
