Venice, California – In celebration of International Peace Day, Google has released an app that enables users to send virtual paper planes across the world.
- Users can send messages to strangers in other parts of the world via the Paper Planes app
- The app, an Android Experiment, show the possibilities of Android and has open-source coding so that others can understand how it was made
Paper Planes, which initially made its debut at the Google I/O event in May, has finally made its way into the app store, Play. Creative digital production studio Active Theory created the app as a way to acknowledge, and perhaps alleviate, feelings of loneliness. ‘The heart of our concept was to bring people together from all over the world, using the power of the web and Android to create an instant connection to one another,’ explains Active Theory.
Users can create a message and fold it into a virtual plane. By flicking their phone with their wrist, users send off to circumvent a digital globe. Other users can then grab one of the planes to receive a random message. The plane eventually makes it back home with stamps of all the places in the virtual world that it has been to.
The Big Picture
While technology has enabled more communication than ever before, it can also be argued that it has limited who we communicate with as we all exist in social, yet silo, communities. Paper Planes makes possible a revelatory experience that brings strangers together online.