Park Pursuit

Park Pursuit is a visual scavenger hunt. The game is designed to allow scavenger hunts to be created anywhere in the world. However, living in Central Florida, the local Theme Parks seemed to be the natural place to start. This version contains 35 clues taken from Disney's Animal Kingdom Park and 20 from Universal Studios Orlando , with more parks to follow shortly.

Background

About four years ago, my manager arranged a team outing at Disney's Epcot theme park. The activity was to be a photo scavenger hunt. He divided us into teams and gave each team a set of photos he'd taken of tiny details he'd found throughout the park. Each team had four hours to find as many of these clues as possible, and then meet him at a specified place and time. Everyone involved loved the activity.

Inspired by this event, I ran a similar scavenger hunt for a youth group a few weeks later at Magic Kingdom. It was a big hit. The only complaint anyone had was the fact that everything was on paper. It rained during the day, and many of the teams' papers got wet.

That's where Park Pursuit was born. I created a basic scavenger hunt application that anyone can play on their phones. Each image in every supported park is geotagged with its location. To create a new game, the player selects a park and the number of clues to be sought. In-progress games are saved automatically, and it is possible to have multiple games going at the same time. The clue images appear on the screen together, so they may be searched for in any order desired. Some of them are harder than others, though the game currently has no way to score the difficulty of each image.

Tapping an image reveals a detail page, with a slightly more enlarged version.Tapping that image flips it over, revealing a hint about how far away and in what direction the actual location might be. There is also a button labeled "Found it."

When the player thinks they've found the right spot in the park, they click the Found It button. At that point, the geotagged location of the image is compared with the current location of the device. If the two are within a predetermined distance, the image is deemed to have been found. If not, the player is shown a mild, but snarky response telling them to get closer.

We intend to add more parks (and not just Disney Parks) to the mix, along with the ability for players to submit their own parks and clues. Watch for application updates.

Disney, Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and Hollywood Studios are registered trademarks of the The Walt Disney Company, and are used herein only for descriptive purposes. They are not intended to imply any relationship, connection, authorization, or approval from the The Walt Disney Company. All photographs and images used in the app are either in the public domain, released under a Creative Commons license, or taken by private citizens and are used with permission.