Is the Future of Games Lurking at the Game Developer Conference?

Posted on March 23, 2009 by Ori Inbar

I am on a flight to San Francisco, barely dodging a thunder storm, for what I expect to be an inspiring week at the Game Developer Conference .
I have been to hundreds of conferences in my career – GDC is one that usually satisfies the crave for inspiration – big time.

Here’s what I’ll be looking for:
The Mobile Games Summit has a bunch of sessions focused on the iPhone such as “Why the iPhone just changed everything”. It also features probably the first major session about Handheld Augmented Reality in the history of GDC (can you believe that?). Blair MacIntyre is best equipped to shoulder the challenge.
You’ll surely find me at the intriguing session: “Beyond the Screen: The Principles of Pervasive Game Design“. Although when Markus Montola speaks about ARGs he means Alternative Reality Games – not Augmented Reality Games – I believe it will be a treat.

Other sessions serve as stepping stones in my pursuit of the ultimate augmented reality game:
Get Smart About Smartphones: Insight Into the Future of Mobile Gaming
Bringing Meaning to Mobile Entertainment
Getting Serious About Alternate Reality: Designing a Different Kind of ARG
The Human Play Machine

Experimental Game Play Session is always fascinating. I wonder what year an AR game will be featured.

Jonathan Blow, Clint Hocking  and Jesse Schell are among the top reasons I am here this week. They’re super smart, artistic, entertaining, yet humble. They remind me why I am so attracted to this industry.

I also wish to ask Will Wright after the session “Stretching Beyond Entertainment: The Role of Games in Personal and Social Change”  if he’s doing anything related to his (celebrated among the AR community) quote: “Games should increase our awareness to our immediate environment rather than distract us from it”

Of course, I’ll be looking for green inducing tips (not what you’re thinking) in sessions such as “Early Stage Funding for Video Game Start Ups”.

The exhibition area usually feels like a SyFy convention. I’ll be looking for the future AR hardware from Vuzix, Nvidia, Microvision, and other contenders (Microsoft?).

Most importantly, I wish to meet like-minded folks.
My first stop is an AR dinner (plotting next year’s AR-attack on GDC) on Tuesday.
I would like to think that among the more than 5,000 attendees, there are at least 50 with a strong interest in Augmented Reality Games. I’ll be in their pursuit…

If you’re at GDC – please give me a buzz.
If not – use me as you’re eyes and ears – what would you have looked for?

So Is the Future of Games Lurking at the Game Developer Conference?

We’ll find out this week.

Filed under: AR Events | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

Hacker’s Cafe Celebrates Virtual Tokyo with Augmented Reality Game

Posted on February 3, 2009 by Ori Inbar

Via Hacker’s cafe

Hacker’s Cafe celebrated Virtual Tokyo day with an augmented reality game  dubbed – by the Japanese tradition – Cyber Star Rally Challenge.

Hackers hacked some virtual stars in a city square and let loose a pack of other hackers riding hacked MTBs, armed with GPS’, Google 3D view and a (hacked) augmented reality software.

They were tasked with one mission only: collect as many stars as possible.

You have to see it to believe it:

How did it work?

Your guess is as good as mine.

(unless you can read the instructions in Japanese)

Filed under: AR Games | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

A New Platform for The Next Generation of Augmented Reality Games

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Ori Inbar

Today we are celebrating!

Ohan Oda from Columbia University in New York just released his new version of Goblin XNA. Kudos!

Goblin XNA is a development framework for Augmented Reality apps with a focus on games. It is based on Microsoft’s popular XNA Game Studio 2.0 that enables game developers to be successful on Microsoft gaming platforms (i.e. PC, Xbox, Win Mobile)

Ohan built it as a one man show (under the supervision of Steven Feiner and with help from his lab colleagues) as part of his PhD research project.

Has anyone tried it so far?

Ohan says he just released it to the public, so as of now, only he and his lab members have. However, the framework was used in 3DUI and Augmented Reality course, so approximately 60 students have used it so far.

What can you do with it?

Check out these demos created with the framework:

AR Racing Game

AR Electronic Field Guide

Want more? Check out the AR Domino on MSDN.

Here is the announcement in Ohan’s own words

We would like to inform you that Goblin XNA is finally released, and
it’s downloadable from http://www.codeplex.com/goblinxna .

We apologize for those of you who waited very long (some of you
probably waited for almost a year).

Source code, API documentation, user manual, installation guide,
tutorials, and a relatively large-sized project (AR domino game) is
included with the release.

For questions and bug reports, Please do NOT email me directly, but
instead, please post your questions and bug reports through Codeplex.
I won’t be able to guarantee quick response since I’m the only
developer of Goblin XNA, but I will try my best to answer your
questions and fix bugs.

Thanks
Ohan

Ohan will be working on the framework for his research at Columbia for another couple of years – so until then you can count on him to continuously update the framework for both bug fixes and new feature additions.

Try it and show us what kind of reality experiences you can build.

Filed under: AR Authoring, AR Engines | Tagged: , , , | Leave a comment »

The Making of ARf: Me, My Dog and i-Phone

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Ori Inbar

Blair MacIntyre sent me a nice proof of concept of an augmented reality virtual pet running on an iPhone.

So I thought, why not write about “the making of ARf”?

Shot a couple of questions to Blair and he conveniently turned it into a well structured interview. Thanks Blair!

Here it is for your edutainment.

games alfresco: Hey Blair, I’d like to write about ARf in my blog.

Blair: Great! :)

games alfresco: Is there anything beyond the video that I could share?

Blair: We (my student Kimberly Spreen, really) did this relatively quickly.  She figured out how to get video [on an iphone], and we’d been thinking about doing a virtual pet game for quite a while, so we decided to implement some of the ideas to test out the iPhone.

games alfresco: Could you share a description of the current features?

Blair: Right now, you can interact via the touch screen, and by moving the markers.  Kim did a nice little implementation of multi-marker tracking where you can just add new markers as you feel like and don’t need to preconfigure the multi-marker layout.  You can interact with the dog by touching it (touch its nose and it jumps up to lick, its tail and it chases it, rub its back and it rolls over to let you rub its tummy) or by touching the ground to send it somewhere.  If it gets near its water it drinks, near the other dog it plays, or near a smudge (that you put on the ground by rubbing the ground) it sniffs it (alas, the smudge looks like a little “pile”, which works, but wasn’t the intent).

games alfresco: Plans for a full game?

Blair: This is a project we’ve been thinking about for a few years, going back to our “Dart the Dog” project that we did in Director.  The goal is to explore what it means to let everyone have a virtual pet they can take with them, and interact with through different interfaces (desktop, handheld, handheld AR, etc).  Most importantly, we want the location (bedroom, living room, work, bus, bar, etc) and activity (sound level, light levels, etc) and presence of other pets to impact how the pet develops.

To handle the development, we are talking to some folks at an AI company, who are creating an engine for doing creature AI based on reinforcement learning.  They hope to have something we can use next year.  If we can get that, we will be able to really have pets that grown, change, evolve, etc.

A few company’s who are funding us are interested in this, so I hope we can devote some energy to it next year.  We’ll probably target a few platforms, but obviously the iPhone has a lot of appeal.  From a research perspective, I’m interested in it because there is the potential to release a research game and (with permission of the people who download it, of course), collect a lot of usage data.  Ironically, since the create AI engine is server based, I don’t know if we could handle a big success and provide the AI service to everyone who gets the game, but I’ll worry about that it we ever get there.

games alfresco: Can you share more details about the software? Is it a Jailbroken iPhone?

Blair: Official iPhone SDK, unhacked phones.  I have no interest in working with jailbroken phones;  the appeal of the iPhone is the potential for mass distribution to support broad evaluation and feedback.

Obviously, we have hacked the API to get at the camera, so we can’t release this until Apple creates an official API.

We are using StbTracker for tracking.  The rest of the software was written by us.

games alfresco: Cool. Thanks for showing us “under the hood” of ARf.

For a doggie game, the name ARf works nicely in English.

It could get weird when translated into:

  • Spanish – jau, jau
  • Afrikaans – blaf
  • Albanian – ham, ham
  • Arabic – how how
  • Armenian – haf, haf
  • Basque –  zaunk-zaunk
  • Bulgarian –  jaff, jaff
  • Catalan – bau, bau
  • Chinese, Cantonese – wow, wow
  • Chinese, Mandarin – wang, wang
  • Croatian – vau, vau
  • Danish – vov, vov
  • Dutch – waf, waf;
  • Esperanto – boj, boj
  • French – ouaf, ouaf
  • German – wuff, wuff;
  • Greek – ghav, ghav
  • Hebrew – hav, hav
  • Hindi – bho, bho
  • Icelandic – voff, voff
  • Indonesian – guk, guk
  • Irish – amh-amh
  • Japanese – wan, wan
  • Korean – mung mung
  • Latvian – vau, vau
  • Persian – vogh, vogh
  • Portuguese – béu-béu
  • Russian – gav, gav
  • Serbian – av, av
  • Slovenian – hov, hov
  • Thai – hoang, hoang

Filed under: AR Demos, AR Games | Tagged: , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Can The New Nintendo DSi Augment Your Reality?

Posted on November 11, 2008 by Ori Inbar

The Nintendo DSi, now with camera, went on sale in Japan on November 1st; next year in the rest of the world.

We were excited when it was announced in September, and thought it could energize the augmented reality games scene. So, here it is, not just with one camera – but two!

Eurogames shares their hands on experience with the newcomer. If you have a fetish for unboxing new products, get your fix with 1Up.

Aaah, but here’s the rub: the cameras boast a mere 0.3 MP each…

Nintendo’s strategy of taking advantage of inexpensive technology and creating new and compelling game experiences has been wildly successful in the past with the DS and the Wii.

Will developers’ ingenuity be able to beat the DSi constraints (cpu power, resolution) and make it play cool AR games?

Still remains to be seen. Until then, take a look at this basic augmented reality software loaded on the DSi:

  • change the color of your shirt – virtually – with the touch of a stylus
  • face recognition that makes you look happy, angry or sad,
  • or if you are more into felines, why not grow cat-ears-and-whiskers?

Filed under: AR Devices | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

Augmented Reality Game Wins Best Mobile Game

Posted on October 29, 2008 by Ori Inbar

We have a winner.

Nokia just announced the winner of its Mobile Game Innovation Challenge. And it’s all…augmented.

I believe the first to break the news was the Earth Times.

In our previous coverage of the competition, we spotted 6 out of the top 10 finalists as augmented reality games. It was a good day.

Kudos to Different Game studio and their creation: Ghostwire, an augmented reality game where players can use the camera on their mobile device to find ghosts.

Just in time for Halloween. How felicitous. Arg…

Different Game is walking away 40,000 EUR richer. Back to Sweden to complete the game and make it a mega success.

***

Update: Stephan from Int13 unearthed the trailer of Ghostwire, and he claims it isn’t a real augmented reality game because it doesn’t register in 3d.

He’s right. But is the experience breaking away from traditional virtual games and encouraging the player to explore reality?

See for yourself in this clip. Or read an interview with creator Tom Soderlund on PoketGamer

Filed under: AR Games | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

These Top 20 Game Publishers Will Disappear – Unless…

Posted on October 23, 2008 by Ori Inbar

Game Developer Magazine just published its Top 20 Publishers of 2008.

How many augmented reality games have these formidable companies published?

Sweet Fanny Adams. Diddly squat. Zilch.

Here’s a summary of the Top 20, with links to individual profile pages:

20. Midway
19. Eidos Interactive
18. Codemasters
17. LucasArts
16. Disney Interactive Studios
15. NCSoft
14. Capcom
13. Namco Bandai Games
12. Vivendi Games
11. Konami
10. Square Enix
9. Microsoft Game Studios
8. THQ
7. Sega of America
6. Take Two
5. Sony Computer Entertainment
4. Ubisoft
3. Activision
2. Electronic Arts
1. Nintendo

The article recaps the publishing landscape:

This year’s list seems to have been influenced somewhat by which companies could adapt with the times…most of the publishers in our top 20 have a decided console focus, demonstrating that the adaptation of new forms of games into the existing model will take some time.

Sure. When a game title costs upwards of $20M to develop (not including marketing) you got to sell a whole load of it. You can’t take risks.

Darvin said that if you can’t adapt, you’ll die. I will argue that in 10 years these publishers (and affiliated studios) will disappear from the list. That is unless they open their minds and wallets to reality games.

I have raved this month about a flood of augmented reality games coming to the iPhone, Google’s Android, and Nokia mobile devices. So what am I ranting about today?

Well, these mind-blowing games are not coming from the above top publishers; they are emerging from the fringe. Tiny boutique studios aren’t trying to predict the future; they are bringing it forward by pushing the envelop of game experiences.

If I were a betting man, I’d say these risk-taking-tiny-boutique-studios will top the charts in the future.

Filed under: AR Games | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

What do Games of 2043 Look Like?

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Ori Inbar

We interrupt this program (“ISMAR ’08) to bring you this breaking news from the Austin Game Developer Conference (via Gamasutra): Futurist and author Bruce Sterling delivered the Tuesday keynote speech where he was tasked to imagine the next 35 years in the game industry:

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”.

Sterling wasn’t all flowers, he continued with a dark prophecy, which I totally agree with:

“Stagnation in the creative side of the industry will hamper their evolution.”

That’s exactly what augmented reality is missing today. The technology is reaching a good-enough stage; the buzz has been built to a more-than-reasonable level; and yet no augmented reality game has broken into the main stream: gameplay, fun, killer-app – you name it, but who’s got it?

Filed under: AR Games | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Will Wright: Augmented Reality – Way Forward For Mobile Gaming

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Ori Inbar

Captured in an interview with Pocket Gamer (Thanks!) in London via Kotaku:

“I can imagine mobile platforms evolving…in that they interact with the world around us in a way that changes our perceptions in a really interesting way”, said Wright, “Games could increase our awareness of our immediate environment, rather than distract us from it”.

Will Wright is by far my idol in the gaming world. He’s the smartest and the funniest, and he single handedly invents new game genres (SimCity, The Sims, Spore).

If you wonder why or how, give yourself 20 minutes off and watch his speech at TED…

 

Is Will joining the Augmented Reality revolution?

(Can you say “mega idol”?…)

Filed under: AR Games | Tagged: , , | Leave a comment »

I want my iPhone augmented too!

Posted on August 31, 2008 by Ori Inbar

The buzz continues.

As the coolest gadget around, the iphone is raising a lot of interest in the augmented reality community. This was once again confirmed in an interview with Stéphane Cocquereaumont, President and Lead developer at Int13, a mobile games developer:

“The iPhone is in fact our main target, the next demo we’ll publish will be on this device, this is probably the best device to do mobile AR today, even if its camera is far from perfect.”

Stéphane conversed with me following a post of Int13’s demo on the augmented reality games facebook group titled: “Augmented Reality on mobile devices that just works” 

He added:

“Our AR library should work easily on devices such as Intel’s MID [which is coming out this summer – games alfresco]…but we’re more interested in Smartphones…”

Games alfresco: How central do you see augmented reality in your company’s future?

Stéphane: “We plan to continue working on our AR technology and improve it, we’re especially interested in markerless tracking.”

And here is what I really liked in this interview:

“But our main objective is to create cool games and sell them”

Int13 is among the first pure game developers to dive into the AR space.

“if our current AR projects reveal themselves to be commercially successful then AR could become central for us.”

Cautious optimism, always a good trait for a game developer.

Thanks Stéphane and France from Int13 for sharing your experiences and plans!

 

Don’t you want your iPhone augmented too?

Filed under: AR Games, AR Devices | Tagged: , , , , | 3 Comments »

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