While mobile versions of the venerable scavenger hunt have been around for a while, some folks from Microsoft have come up with a cool little mashup application they call Pixie Hunt. It’s a Windows Mobile application that uses Flickr and group messaging to runt a hunt, and it looks pretty cool. Here’s the basic idea:
You load the application on your Windows Mobile 5.0 smartphone or PocketPC cameraphone, sign up for an account on Flickr and a group text messaging service, then wait for instructions. Your phone will download a set of tasks like the examples above and you’re off. Each time you take a photo against a task, it’s automatically uploaded to Flickr and tagged. Then all the other team’s phones download it and show it in the game.
The effect is, you get to see all the photos the other teams are taking as they take them, plus you can “smack talk” with the other teams with the integrated group SMS service. The application takes care of basic housekeeping, like keeping score for you and organizing the pictures based on which task they were taken against.
It does have one bonus twist, though — it uses location data to create “location riddles”, so not only do users have to take pictures of certain things, but from the right place as well. This, as well as the added communication between teams, makes things quite a bit more interesting.
The group ran a test last night in Seattle, and you can see their photos on Flickr. In addition, if anybody’s going to the Where 2.0 conference week after next, they’re having a night of play there.
This is an awesome little application — nothing earth-shattering, perhaps, but it looks like a hell of a lot of fun. This is the sort of innovation operators and content providers should be looking to foment, as it has the makings of a cool commercial service, whereby users are provided an infrastructure in which to play and run wild. Operators could host games users could set up for themselves, or a content provider could even take it a step further and create hunts groups of people could play in particular cities. Good stuff!
[tags]mobile, cameraphones, microsoft, windows mobile, scavenger hunt, where 2.0, flickr[/tags]
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