The winners of this year’s Bradley University Big Idea competition are creating an augmented reality game they hope will eventually promote itself.
The inventors of The Hunter System describe it as a “social adventure platform,” using augmented reality and a phone app to let users participate in events at local businesses while also playing an overarching game and earning rewards.
For an example of how an augmented reality game works, think of something like the popular Pokemon Go app that uses a phone to display 3D models of characters in the environment captured by the phone’s camera.
Nabil Tagba is senior game design major at Bradley. He said the idea started off as an augmented reality game, but during the process leading up to the Big Idea competition, a way to combine it with marketing events and supporting local businesses emerged.
“We decided, ‘Well, people are interacting with these events in the real world, what if they could share these events?'” said Tagba. “That’s where the social aspect came in, having them be able to take photos, videos, message each other and share.”
From there, Tagba said there was still an issue with the business model, so how could the businesses themselves get involved?
“For example, say there is a music concert going on, and the organizers want to advertise their music concert, and they want people to come by and stop by and just enjoy the concert,” said Hardik Singavi, a Bradley University masters student working on the accounting side of the project. “Maybe it's an open house. So, we push that event in the game where people and the users just come into that event.”
Singavi explains further: maybe the app adds a task to the event, like a “dance and share a video” and users who complete it receive an incentive like a coupon for the business. It all starts with the owners of a business or concert venue or event space registering an event with the app.
Tagba said the app will have social capabilities, but also be able to integrate sharing to established social media platforms.
Eventually, Singavi said this loop between local business advertising and social media engagement should promote the game on its own.
“We have a prototype that proves that the technology works. We can bring virtual objects into the real world, and not just bring them there, but they have physics enacted upon them,” said Tagba. “They have shadows. They can stand both in front of and behind real world objects. All these interactive aspects make it immersive.”
Tagba said the next step is moving from a prototype to an MVP, or “minimum viable product,” an example of something that a customer could actually use in the way the service is intended.
“We're going to be a full startup, right? We're going to grow. We're going to scale up,” he said. “Right now we're in our pre-seed round, which is just fundraising for projects that haven't been released yet, but they need money to get their product to the market.”
There’s a team of around six people working on The Hunter System. The group won $6,000 to invest into the project through the Bradley Big Idea competition.
After the pre-seed round, Tagba said the project will move onto the seed round, taking a venture capital route to market. The group is applying to accelerators and incubators to take the project further and waiting to hear back on those applications.
After all of that, Tagba said they’ll “see you on the hunt.”
