For this test, I would like to find out more about what kinds of hiding places are feasible to use for a visual scavenger hunt. This would be useful for a puzzle involving a visual search for items hidden in various hiding places. When developing a puzzle involving something like this, you always run the risk of completely underestimating or overestimating the difficultly of the tasks they give. In this case, I want a better idea of what how hard things are to find in open public places.
To run the test, I would like to take small papercraft robots and spread them across the 1st floor of Stata. The robots will be placed on walls, under desks, on pillars, behind artwork, etc. I will then send people one at a time to find and log all of the robots they find.
To learn the most, I would like to try to find a broad range of places to hide things and classify how hard I think each of the things are to find. Then I’ll try to come up with more absolute ways to classify each of the hiding spots like whether or not you have to leave a normal walking path to find it, how high it is, how far away it is from where a person might be, how dark the spot is, etc. I also might change things about the robot itself like putting LEDs on some of them.
Then I will send people out one at a time for a half hour and ask them to take a picture of each one when they find it so I can get a timestamp and verification of when they found each item as well as maybe approximately where they were when they found it.
Afterward, I should be able to get an idea for which ones were harder to find based on how long it took them to find it and which ones were found at all.
