BEAM: Virtual Walking Tours

Your walk is around the block. You don't have to be.

BEAM turns the walking you already do into a journey somewhere else. Your real distance, tracked by your phone's GPS, carries you along a real route through Versailles, London, Gettysburg, New Orleans or Key West. As you go, BEAM tells you what you're passing. Out loud, so your phone can stay in your pocket. And you don't walk it alone.

WALK WITH SOMEONE WHO KNOWS THE PLACE

Not a voice reading a plaque. A person, walking beside you, pointing at things.

Versailles with Louis the Fourteenth, who wrote out how to walk his garden, in order, in 1704 - and who would like you to know that his physicians forbade him to bathe. Every word of his tour is a recording, not a synthesiser.

London with Sir Christopher Wren, who rebuilt it after the fire and was an astronomer before he was an architect.

New Orleans with Jimmy, who walked this city his whole life and stopped being able to see it somewhere in the middle. A stranger once wrote: "Jimmy sees things I could never have seen without him."

Gettysburg with Chamberlain and Longstreet. Two old men in ordinary clothes, decades later, the monuments already up. They made their peace with each other. They still do not agree about the field.

Key West with Max, forty years on the island, who will tell you what is true, what is sold to you, and which is which.

And Disneyland with Lolly, who has given this tour four hundred times and still stops at the bench. Ask her about the rides and she will tell you about the man.

TWO WAYS TO WALK

A guided walk is one tour, in the order it was written, and you hear all of it.

Or choose your own path: point yourself in a direction, pick a distance, and set off to find out what is actually out there. At the end you're somewhere - and then you get a different way home, because the best part of any journey is the road you didn't take on the way out.

WHAT IT DOES

Land: your real walk moves you along a virtual route through a real place, with real landmarks named as you pass them, and a photograph of each one where somebody has taken one.

Water: your real time in a pool carries you across the English Channel, the Hellespont, Alcatraz. Progress accumulates across sessions. Nobody swims the Channel in an afternoon.

Indoors: a treadmill or an exercise bike counts. Your phone can't see satellites in a gym, so BEAM counts your time, or the treadmill's own distance if you type it in. It says which it used.

Atlas: everything you've walked and swum, collected as places rather than as workouts.

Ask Siri to start a walk, and BEAM opens ready to go.

WHAT IT DOESN'T DO

No streaks. No goals. No rings to close. Nothing counts down at you and nothing turns a rest day into a failure. A short walk is reported exactly as warmly as a long one.

No account, no sign-in, no cloud. Your walk stays on your phone: nothing about it is uploaded, and nothing is sold. To tell you what you are passing, BEAM asks OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia and a weather service what is near a set of coordinates. It sends the place, never the person.

No competing against other people. There is no leaderboard and there never will be.

FORTUNE COOKIE

Instead of a score, a fortune. One line, built from your own real numbers and delivered by something with no manners whatsoever.

"12.6 miles walked. In fairness, the ground did most of it."

A challenge in disguise, never a telling-off. Nobody has ever demanded that a fortune cookie be peer-reviewed, which is exactly why it is allowed to be funny.

HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT MEASURES

BEAM records the walks you carry your phone on, and says so. Where it cannot measure something, it shows a dash rather than a guess. Every historical note is sourced, and where a distance is somebody else's measurement, the app says whose.