Video by: Erick Herrarte, Anita Wilhelm, and Nathan Good

Caterpillar Mobile : Corporate Overview : Camera Phone Challenge (site)
Cofounder

UC Berkeley : Final Presentation (.pdf) : Design Documentation (site)
Final Master’s Thesis (Partner: Erick Herrarte)

Zooke is a mobile scavenger hunt framework that allows users to explore the city through interacting with user created challenges.  Using the notion of a ‘challenge’ as a social object, Zooke allows participants to create ‘challenges’ for different degrees of friends or family. Enabling players to experience their environments in new and interesting ways, both physical and social boundaries are questioned as friends and family members challenge one another to document interesting moments or figures along their daily paths. Completing challenges by submitting mobile photos, community members rate how well completion was obtained.

Zooke, as seen in the above video, was my master’s these project at the iSchool at Berkeley. As a finalist in Vertex innovators challenge, a competition between Standford and Berkeley engineering schools, it received an initial sum of investment from a venture capitalist (associated with Redpoint Ventures) and we were able to work to produce a commercial version of the system, on the web and with mobile clients for the following three years.

Caterpillar Mobile was dedicated to creating immersive play experiences with your mobile devices. Our mantra, Mobile Media Fun, exemplified our belief that new forms of media production and creation could be used playfully to help users enjoy their lives more, while looking at the world a little bit differently.  Our beliefs that learning, discovery, and exploration happen thoughout life, not only while sitting in straight rows of chairs in a classroom, were at the pinnacle of the ideas that continued to brew within Caterpillar Mobile.  While the Zooke platform was our first project, we discussed and concepted a number of additional extensions which would lie on top of this foundational system. As the development of the commercial mobile ecosystem proved slower than originally anticipated, we decided eventually to discontinue our commercial pursuits, but to employ our ideas and thinking through a non-profit setting.

As a part of one of the first National Science Foundation grants dedicated to exploring the use of mobile technologies in informal learning settings, Zooke was regarded as a great tool for experimentation in informal learning strategies. As such, we returned Zooke to its home in education and implemented a modified version of the platform for the “Science Now, Science Everywhere” initiate in the Liberty Science Center, released at their reopening in July 2007.  As a children’s learning tool and mobile tour guide The Camera Phone Challenge (as it was now called) was used throughout the museum from July, 2007 – Sept, 2010. Removing the “participatory” challenge creation, we allowed the Science Center complete control over the narrative and direction of their visitors paths and scavenger hunt throughout the museum.  Automatic participant photo aggregation made the tool especially useful for classroom visits to the science center, as teachers could access the galleries of students photos to formulate continued curriculum upon their return.

Since, Zooke, we have seen similar products such as SCVNGR recently appear in the commercial ecosystem.  We like to think some of this initial research, was influential in the direction of these emerging products.