Living in an Augmented Reality

Ok, this is cute.  I wish I thought of it.  A use of FLAR (Flash AR) for something … almost useful?  And, most ironic of all, it’s by the US Postal Service!  I’m almost giddy!

It looks like someone may actually make an AR game for the DSi;  the GhostWire game that someone created on the Nokia phone is now going to be ported to the DSi.

Some folks would say this is not “really” AR, since the graphics (ghosts) are not tightly, accurately, spatially registered with the world.  Normally, I would agree;  as is obviously from my work and other posts, I think it is important to distinguish between different kinds of systems that relate the physical and virtual worlds, because different approaches have different affordances and capabilities.  I tend to call “AR” things that tightly register graphics with the physical world, because it creates experiences that afford certain things (e.g., allows people to leverage their spatial and perceptual abilities to remember where virtual things are, refer to them, perform actions in relation to them, collaborate, and so on). Conversely, I usually refer to experiences like this, that crudely position graphics in a space, as mixed reality (MR).

However, the ghost theme is the one theme that is amenable to “faking AR” on low end devices.  Over the years, we’ve done a lot of ghost-themed experiences, first on Auburn Avenue (an historic area in Atlanta) and later at the nearby Oakland Cemetery (where we had students do class projects for years in our Augmented and Mixed Reality Experience Design class).   One of the reasons ghosts “work” is that we all “know” how ghosts “behave”, and one of these behaviors is that they don’t stick to the real world, they float and shift and even appear to go through objects or walls.  Which is exactly what happens when the graphics aren’t registered.

So, the upside is, I’ll look forward to this game coming out, and like to see how it works.  There are lots of questions that remain to be answered before one can say if this will be good or not, but the idea is interesting and promising.

I’ve been quiet for a while (family stuff), but will start posting again.  I normally don’t focus on my own work, but I’m so proud of the work my students did this year, I want to share.  First, as Ori points out over on his blog, I finally posted the videos from our class projects last fall (wow, did that take a while).  For those that don’t know, last fall I taught a class (coordinated with a class taught by Tony Tseng at SCAD-Atlanta) on handheld AR game design.  It was pretty rough on the students (old, flaky hardware; new, work-in-progress software), but they did a great job.  We had them design and build a new game every month, so it was fast paced and fun.  Here’s a link to the playlist of the videos I posted (not all the games from the class, as a few games never resulted in videos on my computer …).  The game voted best game was Candy Wars, which I’ll embed here.

We also wrote a paper on the class, which was presented at the ACM Foundations of Digital Games conference. We also have a paper in the SIGGRAPH Games Track (on our collaborative AR game, Art of Defense), but I haven’t posted the final video yet (I’ll do that in a few weeks).

Finally, Kim and David improved our zombie shooter game (that I showed off at GDC); there’s a new, much cooler video, up. The game is now called ARhrrrr …