Living in an Augmented Reality

Ori posted a video of the demos, over on his blog.  He called it the first AR demo at GDC, which I don’t think is really true.  Sony must have demonstrated Eye of Judgement years ago, for example.  Plus, NVidia is demoing our game on their Tegra in their booth (so, we at least tied!).  :)

But, I don’t think any of that is important.  The Metaio demos are nice, and it’s good to see them combined with the Vuzix displays in the GDC expo!

Here’s a direct link to the video Ori took:

There’s been enough press about this, so I won’t go into details.  Vuzix had a demo of their two newest displays (the 920, with the camera attachment, and a not-yet-functional physical prototype of the Wrap, due out this summer).  Suffice to say, I believe these displays are marking a turning point for mobile AR. 

Are they sleek and stylish?  Hmmm.  Not yet (by fashion standards) … but, by “what came before them” standards, the new wrap will be very interesting.  Will I carry a pair and wear them?  The answer there depends 100% on the answer to the question “What will I see when I look through them?”   In other words, what are the applications going to be?

The important point, of course, is that the price and quality of these displays, combined with the power of the next generation of mobile devices, will make it possible for people to finally start answering that question.

Ok, I’ve tried to avoid focusing on my own work here, but it’s been a fun week at GDC 2009 so far (the Game Developer’s Conference).  I gave a talk on Handheld AR Games on Monday at the GDC Mobile Summit (Ori wrote about that), and met a lot of interesting people after it.  There is clearly a growing understanding that AR is going to be a significant feature in the landscape of mobile AR, which is really exciting!

I also met with some folks from TouchArcade, a really great site for iPhone game reviews.  We talked for a while about our little iPhone game demo,and I showed them the other demo game we created on NVidia’s reference platform. They wrote a small story about our chat; the big point is that, while the current AR games on mobiles are still a bit rough around the edges, when you see what the new platforms (whether NVidia’s Tegra or TI’s OMAP3 or Qualcomm’s SnapDragon), you begin to understand what handheld AR might be like!

Not to leave out some video, here’s a short video of what I showed them on the NVidia Tegra.

And, for reference, our older iPhone pet game:

In his keynote at AGDC, Bruce Sterling pushed the idea that in the future, all games will be AR games.  His premise of coming back from the future as a student sent by his older self, to talk about the industry in 2043 (35 years from now) is a bit trite, but how can I argue with the observation that

And the games of 2043? “They’re not the kind of games that were developed for flat glass screens — cumbersome,” he said. “We don’t pretend that a flat glass screen is a window into a virtual world… the idea sounds silly to us.”

Then what do the games of 2043 look like? “I think you would call [them] ‘augmented reality’ but we don’t,” Sterling continued. “We think that reality is real — you can have a lot of fun with [an overlaid] game interface.” To Sterling, the games of the future scale from personal “body games” to global games and space games and everything in between — including “neighborhood games”. More importantly, “[In 2043] we’ve got 70 years of computer games — that’s what we’ve got that you don’t have — and we got it from you. All kinds of dead intellectual properties and platforms, all being continually re-released.” 

It sounds like it was a bit of a light, motivational talk, but it seems everyone is getting the AR bug these days.