Windows Phone Thoughts: Pixie Hunt: Scavenger Hunt for Geeks

"A couple of years ago, some friends of mine invited me along on their scavenger hunt. We buzzed around town in teams collecting photos of ourselves performing various fun and bizarre acts (e.g., "take a photo of your team making a human pyramid with a stranger", "take a photo of your team with the Fremont Troll") and generally making a ruckus. We had a ball and occasionally crossed paths with the other teams, but I kept thinking that it would be fun to be able to see what pictures the other teams were taking and banter back and forth during the game. And so Pixie Hunt was born. Pixie Hunt is a mash up prototype a few of us here at Microsoft put together that creates a mobile, connected scavenger hunt game."



A team of developers at Microsoft have developed a prototype scavenger hunt application for mobile devices. You install it on your camera-enabled Pocket PC or Smartphone, sign up for a Flickr account and a group text messaging service, and then download a list of items/tasks, which you then find/perform with the aid of your device's integrated camera. Each photo taken is automatically tagged and uploaded to Flickr, and appears instantly on the other participants' phones. Photos also incorporate geo-data, and are subsequently plotted on a Virtual Earth map for geographical tracking. And while all that is being done, the application keeps track of the score and organises the photos as they are uploaded.

Mobile and always connected: now, that's neat! We should hear more about this in the upcoming weeks. :)