A random experience in exploring
RANDONAUTICA
By Lisa Nicklanovich
Left to right: Haley Cranney, Abby DeNezza, Hannah Stephenson and Sarah Mendus, along with Sarah Bermingham who took the photo, tried Randonauting – exploring a randomly generated location through an app. The group enjoyed getting out in the sunshine, having lunch together and discovering a new park.
Randonautica is an app with more than one million downloads that is trending on TikTok and seems to be a global phenomenon. It is advertised on their website as “The world’s first quantumly-generated ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ reality game.” Randonauts share their experiences with the Randonaut community online after playing the game.
The basic idea is to go outside of your day-to-day routine by using a quantum random number generator to derive a location coordinate to journey to. The app uses your location and generates latitude and longitude locations through Google maps or other technology after answering a few questions.
Before generating the locations, the app encourages the user to set an intention for their journey. Some Randonauts have claimed to have had strange experiences while Randonauting, finding coincidences and synchronicities, or something personally meaningful at the locations that they were sent.
Setting a mental intention before generating the journey likely creates a confirmation bias, yet the Randonaut “theory” suggests more, claiming there are “intention driven anomalies” which can have some influence on the location and experience that is generated. This exploring and experimenting with ideas around quantum mechanics, and consciousness, may help explain the popularity of the app.
Terms like “reality tunnel,” “mind-influenced randomness,” and “dimension jumping” are used in some of the material. You will have to decide for yourself if you believe there is any hard science behind the app, or if it is possibly a bunch of misinformation trying to look like science.
It is with a healthy dose of skepticism therefore that I would look into Randonauting any further than as an outdoor journey to explore in the spirit of curiosity.
Sarah Bermingham, a community resident and intern writer for The Connection, tried Randonauting and found it to be “an entertaining thing to do with some friends, especially considering many places are still closed.” Bermingham said the experience was strange, but “we laughed a lot and ended up taking food to a random park it directed us to. It was a fun way to see parts of the community we had never been before!”
If Randonauting makes you more mindful of the world around you, increases your awareness and attention, and gets you outside, enjoy. However, use common sense – respect people and their property, don’t trespass, don’t venture where it isn’t safe to do so, and leave the area cleaner than you found it.
