ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones. The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

http://www.augmentedenvironments.org/lab/research/handheld-ar/arhrrrr/

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• augmented
• reality
• tegra
• nvidia
• georgia
• tech
• AR
• mobile
• game
• 3d
• shader
• ES
• zombie
• FPS
• shooter
• touch
• cochard
• macintyre
• indiecade
• 2009

[alynnidalar]

Sounds like a very cool idea! It might need a little more work (or a little more explanation, especially about how the 'bombs' work--can you use anything other than Skittles? (M&Ms, say) Is there a limit to how many can be on the playing field at once? What benefits/drawbacks are there to using each bomb?), but all in all a very neat idea and one I hope we see more of in the future.

[pot2mayo]

@alynnidalar I can give you some answers. We use color recognition for the bombs so anything would work as long as they are bright orange or green. We chose those skittles with quite unnatural colors so there is little chance they appear in the real background, or on the users clothes. You can put as many bombs as you want on the field, no limit (just the number of skittles you get before eating them all :).

[pot2mayo]

The orange bombs being proximity bombs, they need little attention and anyone passing close by would set them off. The drawback is that once armed, you have no way to deactivate it. How many times a civilian got in the way after I armed the bomb and I couldn't do anything about it. Green bombs give you more control and you can set it off whenever you want, but they keep you focused on a particular zone for a while and you might not realize that civilians are being killed elsewhere in the game.

[alynnidalar]

@pot2mayo - thanks for the reply! That makes a lot of sense, and I understand it better now. What would happen if you physically removed the Skittle from the playing area? Would it still register it as being there?

[pot2mayo]

@alynnidalar In the current version yes, that could lead to problems eventually (e.g. you arm a green bomb, remove the skittle, then you are left with no way to set it off unless you put the skittle back in place).

But since we now exactly where they should be on the map, we can easily constantly check if whether the skittle is still here or not as long as that part of the map is visible through the video stream. That was still a prototype so there are stuff like that we did not really polish :)

[insanity54]

I wish the tegra had some sort of trigger or button to press to fire instead of touching on the screen anywhere you want...

[pot2mayo]

Tegra is the name of the GPU (graphics processing unit) only, not the whole device. It can be used on any kind of handheld device (eg. phones, the new MS Zune)

[anthony62490]

Ok, the AR is cool. The fact that is was implemented into a game is even cooler. But the fact that you can use a bag of Skittles as bombs is just pure genius.

[Dragoony12345]

The LCD-size look widescreen (16:10 / 16:9), so I guess the resolution is 800x480, not 800x600, like shown in the beginning of the video. ;)

[theshabushka1]

Why cant they make these games for the ipod touch?! This is the future!!

[Nevrosert]

I love the future. <3

[FloppyTrout]

Yeah nintendo is doing the same things right now with the 3ds.

[Jimpiedepimpie]

Awesome.

Does it work on a htc wildfire?

[imnick93]

wow, this is FLIPPING amazing

[damienqui]

@TommyFilth1

Yeah, that doesn't sound like anything special.

As a game design student, I am looking forward to the potential of AR

[Sp4ceLizard]

I can see the basic idea behind this being used to create some kind of virtual reality goggle system... whether that's a good or bad thing, i don't know.

but either way, this is really neat. :v

[loyesj]

This technology has been in use for year to fake American news broadcast

[nublex]

@SoadDreamer pretty old idea, the technology however became good enough just recently

[SoadDreamer]

is this a real idea or just a fake?