Shark Week Viewers Can Track Great Whites in Real Time

[The Straight Story]

Shark Week Viewers Can Track Great Whites in Real Time

As part of the Discovery Channel's mega marketing blitz for this week's "Shark Week," area/code (the people that brought us PacManhattan) have developed an online game that lets you track real sharks traveling in real-time.

Sharkrunners allows players to control virtual ships as they track real great whites tagged with GPS units.

According to area/code:

Real-world telemetry data provides the position and movement of actual great white sharks in the game, so every shark that players encounter corresponds to a real shark in the real world.

Because the ships you control move at real world rates, players receive email and/or SMS alerts during the day when their boat targets a shark.

The goal of the game is to collect data on sharks in the area. You earn more "funding" depending on the type of data you collect.

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/08/shark-week-view.html