With all the talk about the potential of Google Glass, I thought it might be nice to drop back in on the current state of Augmented Reality — the kind where you still use a smartphone to view markers or images.
In the spirit of Google’s “20-percent time”, Melbourne Australia based mobile app development company jTribe developed an Augmented Reality Easter egg hunt for their fair city this Easter.
The company took one day a week (for the last 10 weeks or so) to work on their own project which launches today.
The app, which is called EggRaider, has a radar-style viewer to show the general direction of virtual eggs the company has attached to landmarks all around Melbourne. Once you get close to an egg, you switch to Augmented Reality view (by tapping the camera button in the app) to see the egg and collect it. “Race against friends and family to collect the most” says jTribe.
*Note that the virtual eggs are only available at Melbourne, Australia landmarks. There is a demo view though, so you can get the idea of how it works if you are so inclined.
This is not the first AR Scavenger hunt. REI has done one. Clutter magazine another.
What I like most about this concept though is that the company just did it on their own…no waiting around to sell to a client…just a rapid prototype that they brought to fruition and submitted for the sake of coolness, learning and potential as a product.
In terms of future use, this kind of scavenger hunt does have marketing potential for brands, especially within the teen and tween segments. These younger customers are collectors and would probably flock to games and campaigns built around technology like this.
The app is available at iTunes.