HUNT: Scavenger Hunt with Augmented Reality

Introduction A scavenger hunt is a popular game in which the organizers define a list of objects or tasks for players to find or perform, often within a set time limit. When the individual or team participants find objects and perform tasks, they collect the found objects and/or take photos/videos to prove they have satisfied the tasks on the list. While scavenger hunts are fun to play, game organizers often design games to encourage players to explore specific geographic areas or to familiarize them with certain topics of interest. A university setting can be an ideal place to hold scavenger hunt games. Every year new students arrive, and before starting their academic life they are often required to attend various orientations to familiarize them with university life and policies. Gamification, the application of game elements to non-game problems, can be used to enhance student experiences in orientations and can provide memorable learning experiences in various programs and services. Similarly, libraries and museums could also benefit from this popular game to showcase their facilities. Material published as part of this publication, either on-line or in print, is copyrighted by the Informing Science Institute. Permission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these works for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage AND that copies 1) bear this notice in full and 2) give the full citation on the first page. It is permissible to abstract these works so long as credit is given. To copy in all other cases or to republish or to post on a server or to redistribute to lists requires specific permission and payment of a fee. Contact Publisher@InformingScience.org to request redistribution permission. This project explores an innovative approach to the scavenger hunt game by developing an iPhone application, HUNT, with Augmented Reality (AR) capability for the users to play the game. There is also an administrative website that can be used by game organizers to create games for users. The authors were asked to develop an app for their university library, whose staff recognized a need to find a better approach to introducing library facilities and services to their visitors in a fun and attractive way, while also enhancing the effectiveness of their visits. With rapidly developing new technologies, scavenger hunt games have seen a resurgence. One well known example is reported by Talton, Peterson, Kamin, Israel, & Al-Muhtadi (2006) in which the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used handheld computers to run scavenger hunt games with incoming freshmen in the Department of Computer Science for the purposes of orientation and retention. They found a significant correlation between student participation in the scavenger hunt and retention rates in the department. They also found that playing the game improved the attitude of new students toward computer science. Augmented reality is a technology that refers to the use of computational displays to add virtual information to a user's sensory perceptions (Feiner, 2002). It allows users to see more, hear more, or even touch more. People can perceive entirely computational components and objects within the real world experience (Van Krevelen & Poelman, 2010). For example, people could read the reviews of the restaurants that they pass by as they walk down a street, visitors could see additional information in multimedia form of special exhibits in a museum, machinists repairing a broken piece of equipment could receive instructions highlighting in real time what to do next, firefighters could see the structure of a burning building to avoid invisible hazards on the scene, and soldiers could see the position of enemy snipers who had been spotted by unmanned reconnaissance aircraft (Feiner, 2002). According to a survey of augmented reality conducted by Azuma and others (Azuma, 1997; Azuma et al. …