Hide N Seek

Inspiration

The main inspiration is coming from some thinking about the new interaction modes offered by AR and the blending of the real environment with digital assets and digital information. I wanted to leverage the fact that the Hololens is providing a lot of information about the user behavior : where the user is moving, where she/he is looking at, doing with her/his hands, ...

Working in the enterprise software space I also wanted to work on potential real use case for the industry and explore the "gamification" of experience that AR could bring.

Finally as an amateur 'magician' I have always been inspired by 'tricks' : achieving a memorable and surprising experience through simple yet innovative ways. (see my detection of what the user is looking at by using AR sphere models with invisible material !)

What it does

In hideNseek, a player has to find points of interest in the room. The player receives vocal instructions and can use help in the form of localized sounds, halo on the objects to find or a compass. The game ends when all objects have been found (looked at) by the player and the total time is displayed.

hideNseek also offers a configuration mode where the game master sets up the list of objects to find by placing an AR target and recording a name for each object.

hideNseek saves the game configuration as anchors and object metadata files.

How we built it

My goals was to learn StereoKit. Having some experience with Unity and MRTK I really wanted to use SK exclusively and see If I could implement what I had in mind. So I just created a backlog in a spreadsheet with all my functionalities with mandatory / nice to have tag ( remember I'm a project manager !).

For each functionality the process is simple :

Search for the closest sample in the demos folder addressing a similar point.
Read the documentation for any API call involved in the sample.
Add some C# code in my app to test the idea with a working skeleton and test on Hololens as fast as possible.
Add in my spreadsheet all the idea of "flesh" I could add to this skeleton. The key point here is to resist the urge to implement many details for this specific functionality right now. Just add them in the backlog. You better address priorities to have a complete working product.

Challenges we ran into

Could not found a good way to debug the app on Hololens.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Project done in 5 days including learning StereoKit : it's a testimony of effectiveness of SK approach.
Created what I call a "serious" game which can have application in the industry
Using a large part of the SK API

What we learned

Code first approach for building AR Scene. SK API

What's next for Hide N Seek

HideNSeek is the basis of inspection and training use cases. It can be adapted to security inspection, someone could prepare the list of "things" to search for, like locate the exit sign, verify the battery is ok then locate the extinguisher, verify the replacement date etc ...

The execution of the scenario would be completely tracked so one can prove / verify that the employee has actually seen / interacted with the different elements. This has an important impact in the industry in terms of quality security and auditability.