You can now purchase a real compass that points only to the Times Square Olive Garden.
Its creators, Jason Goldberg and Steve Nasopoulos, teamed up with Glub Glub Labs to build an actual handheld compass that always points users toward the chain restaurant’s flagship location in Manhattan. It sounds like a joke because it is a joke — just one that required real engineering.
The device uses an Arduino Nano microcontroller, a GPS unit, a gyro sensor and a stepper motor to constantly direct the needle toward the Times Square Olive Garden’s fixed coordinates. Since the restaurant isn’t moving anytime soon, the compass can work offline using hard-coded location data and onboard trigonometry. In other words: an alarming amount of intelligence was poured into this bit.
Even more perfect, part of the project reportedly got delayed because one of the guys doing the coding got accepted to Harvard.
The creators told The Verge they made it because they were tired of guessing which way the Times Square Olive Garden was and wanted a more analog experience than checking a phone. But the biggest surprise of all is how many people seem to feel the same. More than 2,000 people have already joined the waitlist, which means there are thousands of people who saw a single-purpose Olive Garden navigation device and thought, yes, that belongs in my life.
There’s also something refreshing about how gloriously unnecessary this is. Every new gadget now claims it will optimize your life, fix your habits or revolutionize the future. This one just points to unlimited breadsticks. No productivity angle. No attempt to change the world. Just a beautifully stupid object doing one very specific job.
