I'm right here — where are you?

In short

When we need to find each other at a festival, we send a photo of what we can see, assuming the perspective is enough for the other person to work out where we are. A photo is a view from a point — but that point is the one thing the photo does not contain. The recipient gets the sender's surroundings and is missing the sender's position. The same goes for "next to the beer tent" and "just behind the sound tower": we share landmarks, because landmarks are what we can see ourselves. Raduno is inspired by that observation.

The message that can't be used

It's half past seven in the evening at Roskilde Festival. Four friends lost each other somewhere between the food stalls and Orange Stage, and now there's a photo in the group chat: the orange canvas, half of a big screen, a lot of backs of heads.

Underneath it says "we're here!"

He looks at the photo. He can see exactly what she can see. He even thinks the angle is exactly the same. And he hasn't the faintest idea where to walk to find his friends.

It isn't that the message is a bad one. It's that a message of that kind cannot carry the piece of information he needs.

A photo is a view, not a place

A photograph is a record of how the world looks from one particular point. Everything in the picture is defined by that point: what's in front, what hides what, how big the stage appears to be.

And that exact point is the one thing not in the picture. The camera is standing in it. It cannot photograph itself.

So there is nothing the recipient can do to get any further. He doesn't need to read the message more carefully or look harder. The information isn't there. She has sent her surroundings and kept her position.

It's worth noticing that the mistake is a sympathetic one: she shares what she actually has. She can see the stage, so she sends the stage. A festival site has no house numbers, no street names and no addresses — things that stick up out of the landscape are the only language the place makes available.

"Next to the beer tent" has the same problem

The photo is just the clearest version of it. The other things we tend to send do exactly the same:

• "Next to the beer tent." There are nine beer tents.
• "Just behind the sound tower." Behind, seen from where?
• "We're standing where the bass is really loud." So are 30,000 other people.
• "Can you see the yellow flag?" We can see fourteen yellow flags, and none of them is yours.

All five messages share the same structure: a physical feature the sender can see — and that the recipient may be able to see, or can see too many of, but which doesn't pin the position down precisely enough. A landmark only works if it is unique and visible from both places and covers a small enough area among all those people. On a festival site there are remarkably few of those.

The classic solution is to call. And the call really is a solution: two people talking to each other can negotiate their way to a meeting point. But it costs two people's full attention for several minutes, it works badly when the music is playing, and it has to be done again from scratch for every person in the group.

Why a map isn't simply the answer

The other obvious answer is a dot on a map. Share your position, see each other's dots, walk over. That's a large part of the answer too — just not all of it.

For one thing, the problem with most services of that kind is that everyone in the group has to download an app, create an account and share location data with each other. It's too complicated and too intrusive, and often it can't be done at all when half of you are on Android and the other half on iPhone.

But say you got that far: the map is good at telling you the others are 400 metres to the northeast. The map is poor exactly where you're standing 20 metres from them in a dense crowd, having to decide whether to go left or right around the sound tower. That is precisely where two dots, both trembling a little, turn into two people walking straight past each other.

Why that is — and why the problem gets worse the closer you get to each other, which is the exact opposite of what you'd expect — is for another article.

What we're doing about it

Raduno is built on the observation that what you can share without effort is your view, and what the other person needs is your position relative to their own. Which is why our prototype was simply a compass needle pointing at your friend, however the two of you move around.

Raduno's mission is to make finding each other in physical space easy and fun — at a festival, in town, on holiday — with no download and no sign-up, and with respect for everyone's privacy.

The "where are you?" link. You send one link in the group chat you're already writing in. The others open it in their browser and answer with their position. No download, no account, no "would you like to create a profile". Positions are shared temporarily and delete themselves again — no history of where you've been is being built.

The radar. When you're close to each other and still can't see each other, a map is no longer the right picture. The radar shows direction and rough distance to the others, turned to follow the phone's compass, so "up" on the screen is the way you're looking. It answers the only question you have left at that point: which way?

There's more coming — convoy, meeting point — but we'll write about it when it's ready.

The short version

We aren't bad at explaining where we are. We are reduced to explaining it with what we can see, and what we can see is precisely not where we're standing.

It isn't a problem you can write your way out of with a better message. It's a problem that disappears the moment the one missing thing — the point the camera was standing in — comes along by itself.

Raduno makes finding each other easy and fun, with no download and no sign-up.