An AR Framework for City-Wide Treasure Hunting

Abstract

This bachelor thesis explores the use of Augmented Reality (AR) technology in the context of pervasive mobile games. A fully functional city-wide AR treasure hunt game is developed together with a framework that assists in building similar games. It is implemented in the Unity Game Engine using the Vuforia Unity extension for AR applications by Qualcomm. The game is similar to a traditional scavenger hunt where players navigate to several locations by following hints. AR is used to virtually overlay a puzzle onto a building front at each location which can be found with the camera in the device. Solving a puzzle unlocks the next hint to find the next location. Playtesting sessions were held to gather player feedback.
This thesis presents a description of the finished game and its implementation. There are remarks about using GPS for mobile games and a test to see how well Vuforia is suited to detect building fronts.

This thesis was a collaboration of the Computer Graphics Laboratory ETH Zurich and FI Content.

Featured in 'Augmented Creativity: Bridging the real and virtual worlds to enhance creative play' by Zünd et al. 2015.