ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Simply: Wow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cix3Ws2sOsU

Tim

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

That's cute, but I don't know how much I care about adding things to a preexisting, static map. Maybe if that happened on my living room floor it would be more fun - or did I just skip that part?

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Want one :)

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

mmm, skittles

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Oh. My. While that particular game strikes me as something to occupy my for 5 minutes as best, I certainly can imagine more capturing (especially human-vs-human) interaction. Now, if we only knew our Maemo 5 generation devices will be good enough to do what this tegra thingy does.

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Wow! This thing is like a shooting brick.

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Ok, I like that, but I want the Nvidia device too. :D

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

5 Mega pix and a 600x800 screen?

And all they did was shoot zombies...

Freaking cool zombies! :)

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Very cool. I hope to see nifty stuff like this for the Maemo device too. We'll have a GPS, too, so the possibility of full human-scale games becomes possible... Won't we all look like nerds, walking down the street, holding up our devices to look for enemy players (although they'll be pretty obvious; they'll be holding up their devices too...)

How about a vibra-alert that lets us know we're near another player... Both players have to draw their devices, locate the enemy via augmented reality (which will also show you what team, class, kind of armour and weapons they have,etc), then you have to attack... The coolest battles will be the 'swordfights', where the game links the players via bluetooth and uses the accelrometer, GPS, camera, etc to locate the players' weapons. You wave your devices around and they make light-saber sounds, sizzling and buzzing the vibrator when they strike, and the devices announce hits and damage...

yeah. cooler than skittle-bombs.

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Back when I was doing mobile app development, I thought about building an interactive GPS based game system. They already exist, but are mostly very static, not much more than geocaching. But your idea is SOOO much better.

That's a matter of opinion :p I stand by my earlier comment: mmm, skittles.

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Heh, it's going to be easier than than - they're going to stick out like a sore thumb because of the ridiculous amount of markers (badges ?) on limbs :)

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

I agree fully; but, you do what you can with the technology you have. Tons of researchers are working on tracking the camera's position using the "natural features" in the world. It will come. But, for now, it was fun to do a game that didn't involve little black squares. :)

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Yes, the game isn't very deep right now. It was originally a tech demo, done with NVidia for GDC (meant to be played for 60 seconds in their booth). We've done a few other multiple player games, and we wanted to get this one to that point, but the students graduated. Darn them. :)

I personally feel that multi-player games (face to face) are the thing AR will be really good at, since you are (more or less, depending on the technology) looking at the world and each other, not the screen.

Not sure about the Maemo 5 ... but, most next gen chipsets (Tegra, OMAP3, SnapDragon, Atom) can do this sort of thing if you tried.

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Thanks for dropping by, Blair! :)

Tim

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

I mentioned Maemo 5 because in Maemo 4 we have this awkward situation where we couldn't use almost any of the graphics goodies of the underlying (more than capable OMAP2) chipset because of driver(/licensing?) issues. We know we'll be getting OMAP3 and will have hardware support for 3D, but without actual devices/code in the wild it's hard to tell just yet how good that support will be. :)

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Ah, I see. Well, the OMAP3 is definitely capable, and I hope Maemo 5 will be more open. Note that all the OMAP3 dev kits run linux (check out the beagleboard.org, and the Zoom dev kits) and are very open (we've finally managed to get all the components for doing AR going on a Beagleboard, for example).

So, I hope that it'll be possible. I assume when you refer to maemo 5, you are talking about the rumored next gen tablet (N900)?

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Yes, but Maemo quirks will still be have to taken into account. There were hints of a 'game mode' which should make it possible to do things without Clutter or Hildon-desktop interference, but that is still work-in-progress item. Of course, as long as the kernel level support for all the hardware is there, any potential Maemo limitation can be danced around, it's just a question of convenience/UI inconsistency, which I guess we can live with :)

Re: ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter...
 

Well, I posted a great UI design not long back, which would have really done a lot for the tablet, however, only the Mer guys were interested. Nokia gave me the cold shoulder, nitrogen style. :(