Ocarnia – A flute that really does take you to a magical land

Some of us remember Zelda, a game that I originally played on Nintendo 8 bit. Aside from generally being, in my opinion, the mother of all role playing games, it had some really fun features which brought you into the Zelda world and kept you there. One of my favorite features was the whistle. Hard to get, it gave you the ability to warp within the game.

The Ocarnia application by Smule is one of the coolest that I’ve seen come into the app store for a while. It utilizes the inherent iPhone features while pushing the boundaries of what we would normally consider an app to do. Yes, it is a flute. Yes, it has all of the roots and modes that really only make sense to a full-fledged mucisian. But, if you click on the globe from the primary nav, you enter into an experience that is different to most applications I’ve found.

In the globe feature, you see essentially two things. 1) The hot spots of iPhone users with the Ocarnia application installed and 2) The location in the world a person is playing right at that very second. This what I really find to be “other-worldly” – the fact that I can listen to a person interacting with their phone at this very moment in time connects me to their life in some other place on the planet.

It’s really surreal.