KidICA
The in-store photo safari game
Before AI was cool
KidICA grew out of my time as a consultant for ICA reklam. The idea was simple: turn the weekly grocery run into a safari. Kids get a question, and somewhere in the store is the answer. Their job is to find it and photograph it while their parents shop.
I built the whole thing in Unity and C#, modelled the characters in Blender and did the art in the Adobe suite. Three cats — Cez, Ias and Ade — guide you through a map of levels, each one worth up to three stars, with a trophy room to fill up along the way.
Checking the answer
The clever bit is how the game knows whether you found the right thing: computer vision AI. Every photo the kid takes is sent to Google's Vision API, which detects the objects and any text in the picture, and the game matches what comes back against the answer. No fixed set of products, no barcodes — just point the phone at a bunch of bananas and the AI figures out what it is looking at.
This was years before AI became the thing everyone talks about, and it is still one of my favourite examples of what happens when you hand a camera to a kid and give them a reason to look closely at the world around them.
