Dynamic Spimes
Spime’s groundbreaking “Dynamic Spimes” feature enables users to stay connected with Spime while on the move.
Spime operates on the “Here – Now” principle, forming networks based on your current location. This is ideal for stationary scenarios, such as a party at a friend’s house, where you create a Spime within a specified radius. Everyone within that radius can see and join your Spime network automatically.
But what happens when you’re on the go, whether on a bus, train, or cruise ship? Your “here” is constantly changing.
Welcome to Dynamic Spimes
Dynamic Spimes adapt to your moving location, ensuring continuous connectivity and network formation, no matter where you are.
When you make one of your Spimes “Dynamic,” it follows you everywhere you go. Your “here” becomes dynamic, allowing your Spime to move with you. This ensures that you and everyone around you stay within your Spime. Your Spime will continue to appear as “Nearby” to you and everyone else in your vicinity.
How to make a Spime “Dynamic”
A Spime must exist before you can make it “Dynamic”.
- Tap “Active” at the bottom.
- Tap on the Spime you want to turn “Dynamic”.
- Tap on the pencil icon at the top-right, to edit the Spime.
- Enable the Dynamic Spime switch. Please note that the “Dynamic Spime” feature requires the use of tokens.
How it Works
The app utilizes your device’s sensors to detect motion changes and determine the type of motion (if you are walking, running, in a car, etc.), with your permission.
As you and your device start moving, the location of the Dynamic Spime adjusts accordingly. You’ll also notice the radius of the Spime increasing, designed to keep everyone moving with you within the dynamic Spime, based on their devices’ updated location. The radius increases depending on your type of motion. For instance, if you are in a car, the radius expands more than it would if you were walking.
Before the app switches to Stationary mode, it ensures that your device has truly stopped moving, preventing Stationary mode from activating while you’re temporarily stopped, like at a red traffic light.
To conserve battery life, geolocation is disabled when the device is in Stationary mode.
The service must run in the background
Dynamic Spimes functionality relies on the position of the Spime’s owner. To keep everyone connected within a moving Spime, the app continuously updates the owner’s location, even when the Spime app is in the background or the device is on standby. This is why the app requires, and asks for, permission to use background location services. Dynamic Spimes can only operate if you grant this permission.
Specifically, you must approve permissions for the use of location services in the background, “always”. The app will request this after your first login. Allowing location services only “while using the app” will cause the functionality of Dynamic Spimes to malfunction until you enable background location services via your device’s settings.
Please note: To further preserve battery life, the app enables background location tracking only if the user currently has an active Dynamic Spime. For all other users, background location tracking remains disabled.
On iOS devices, when the device is stationary and the app is in the background or on standby, the device “awakes” location services after it has moved approximately 200 meters. This limit is enforced by Apple. If you need to “wake up” location tracking more quickly, simply bring the app to the foreground.
Near-real-time data
You can monitor the information your device reports to Spime at near-real-time by clicking on the speedometer icon inside a Spime Details screen. (That’s where you see the photo grid.). The information includes:
- Odometer: Total distance traveled since you enabled the Dynamic feature on this Spime.
- Current Activity: Still, On Foot (Walking or Running), Walking, Running, On Bicycle, In Vehicle (or boat, train, etc.), Unknown
- Activity Detection Confidence: How confident the App is that it is reporting the correct Activity type.
- Speed: Your current speed in km/hr.
- Speed accuracy: Uncertainty of the speed measurement, in meters per second (m/s). It indicates how close the reported speed is likely to be to your actual speed.
- Heading: The direction in which your device is moving, in degrees.
- Heading accuracy: The precision of the device’s heading measurement, given in degrees. It indicates the confidence in the reported heading or direction in which the device is moving.
- Altitude: The height of your device in relation to sea level or ground level. It is also commonly referred to as elevation.
- Altitude, ellipsoidal: The height of your device above the reference ellipsoid, a mathematically defined surface that approximates the shape of the Earth. Ellipsoidal altitude is measured as the vertical distance from the reference ellipsoid to your device. The reference ellipsoid is a smooth mathematical surface that approximates the Earth’s shape but does not account for variations in gravity.
- Altitude accuracy: The uncertainty of the altitude measurement, reported in meters. Indicates how close the reported altitude is likely to be to the true altitude. A lower value means higher confidence in the altitude measurement.
- LAT/LNG: Your current latitude and longitude coordinates.
- Battery Level: Although we take every measure possible to preserve batter life, we thought it’s a good idea to give you an indication of power left in your device.
What we store
We store only the last known location for each active user, which the app uses to determine proximity to Active, Distant, and Dynamic Spimes. Without this data, the app cannot function.
We DO NOT advertise your current location in the app or anywhere else. Other users can only see an indication of their estimated distance from your last known location, without specifying direction.
We DO NOT store any historical location information.
The last known location is discarded when:
- You disable “Dynamic” on a Spime, or
- The Spime expires, or
- You delete the Spime.