The Augmented Environments lab at Georgia Tech (AELatGT) has recently uploaded to Youtube videos showing off many games developed as projects in the “HAR: AR Game Design Studio” class last year. Blair MacIntyre‘s students came up with some interesting ideas (some would say unconventional), but in my view, there’s one clear winner –
Candy Wars is a physics oriented game, played with your fridge magnets, where the goal is to feed a frog until it explodes. Things couldn’t be better:
Many more video goodies can be found on AELatGT’s Youtube page. Just a little tip – don’t be tempted by the name, GuitAR hero, is nothing more than a rickroll in AR disguise.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: artoolkit, Games, Georgia Tech, Handhelds and Cellphones, web camera |
Games Alfresco 
quite nice but this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCF2Q0w6hkg physics game is cooler ;)
@Loechti, yep, it’s a cool idea, that’s on my ever growing “to cover” list.
hehe, fantastic stuff.
I don’t generally mind criticism, and will usually let the students work stand on it’s own, but @Loechti’s comparison seems pretty unfair. The video you point at is a hacked tech demo; it’s not a game. It’s cute, but … sheesh. Given that it seems to be running on a “real” computer (good processors, graphics, etc), it’s pretty lowbrow. The sketch recognition stuff that the Sony guys did on the PS3 is by far cooler.
In contrast, keep in mind that these students built real, working AR games (i.e., some of them are actually the beginnings of games that would actually work on mobile AR devices, that are fun to play, and so forth) on a pretty weak device (the Gizmondo). And each of these games was done in a small number of weeks, as part of a class (that many of them were taking as part of a full schedule!).
(Of course, given that I think the whole projectors+phones thing is a fad that is destined to die, despite lots of smart folks coming up with really cute names for it, I’m not predisposed to like that sort of thing. :)
Anyway, thanks for posting this Ori; I am really proud of the student projects, considering most of the students had neither done AR, nor had they used mobile devices like the Giz; the SCAD students had to deal with a really rough content pipeline (which barely worked till the end of the semester) and the software was evolving as the semester progressed. Each group designed, built and tested 3 different games over the first part of the semester, and then polished one for the last few weeks. It was hectic and fun.
We’re going to do it again, on a better platform, with better tools … or at least, I want to, if I can find someone to give me a bit of $$ … iPhones and Unity3D are pricey for a whole class.
[…] 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 […]