SWE Scavenger Hunt 2020

Inspiration

With students living at home throughout the COVID-19 epidemic, high school visitation to colleges has taken a staggering blow in numbers. Incoming high school students have no way to get a feel for how campus life feels, and we felt that with the help of AR/VR, students could get a little closer to experiencing college life through this pandemic.

What it does

Our scavenger hunt is essentially a Google Form, but uses videos as well as EchoAR's framework to add some AR activities into the mix. Participants must guess the next location on UVA grounds from four options, and hints are given through QR codes; these hints are both 3D objects as well as image files that can lead participants to better understand what makes the next location unique.

How I built it

The entire framework of the project runs around EchoAR for the augmented reality clues as well as Google Forms for a framework of a step-by-step scavenger hunt. In the future, this could definitely be replaced by a web application that uses EchoAR in a more streamlined process.

Challenges I ran into

Time was certainly an issue; we had to record video, audio, attend workshops, and construct EchoAR models within less than ten hours. If we had more time, we likely would have used a HTML/CSS/JS framework.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We used EchoAR for the first time, and created a product that could actually be used for incoming students to get a feel for UVA grounds (albeit with more finesse as well as finishing the rest of the EchoAR models).

What I learned

We learned about EchoAR and ways to implement it in an easy and reusable fashion.

What's next for SWE Scavenger Hunt 2020

We definitely need to work on finishing the rest of the Google Form questions so it is a comprehensive scavenger hunt, but our ideas can easily be extended to other places and locations around grounds.