Henson Day AR App
A production iOS AR scavenger hunt for UMD Henson Day, built for 20,000+ annual attendees with RealityKit spatial anchors and a persistent HUD.
The problem
The project needed to work for first-time users during a live campus event, with no setup session, no real tutorial window, changing outdoor lighting, and participants constantly switching between apps. Standard onboarding and modal-heavy flows fall apart fast in that setting.
What I did
I designed the scavenger hunt around persistent AR anchors tied to real campus locations, with progress shown in a heads-up display instead of interruptive dialogs. I also built persistence around the assumption that people would background the app, open maps, and come back later. The work sits on a 5+ engineer AppDev team.
How it works
SwiftUI handles the app shell and persistent HUD, RealityKit handles anchor detection and spatial content, and SwiftData keeps progress alive across app restarts. The anchor placements were tuned against specific campus locations so the experience stayed usable under messy lighting and real event conditions. CI runs across the AppDev team.
What happened
The app is a production scavenger hunt for Henson Day, an event with 20,000+ annual attendees. It made it through the event without participant-blocking issues and was shown to initiative sponsors and university leadership.