Pandemica Augmented Reality Game

Posted by augmentedplanet under General

Pandemica from XMG Studios is the latest augmented reality iPhone game that uses the camera and accelerometer to produce an entertaining arcade style shooter that you can experience with full 360 degrees of movement. Pandemica transforms your iPhone into a sub-field bio-scanner that can detect the invisible alien organisms that are around you, and like all alien organisms they are not friendly. Armed with your sub-field bio-scanner your mission is to eliminate the alien threat before they have the chance to get you and cover you in goo.

Like most arcade games, as you progress you’ll have the opportunity to unlock better weapons to help you fight off the alien hordes, weapons such as Missiles, Continuous Electron Beam and the Bosnoic Field Bomb produce the necessary firepower to survive some of the games harder levels. As with the other augmented reality games that fall in to this new genre, the game requires you to be active, it’s not the type of game you’ll be playing while sitting on the sofa or the train to work. As the game takes place in reality you’ll constantly be looking behind you for the next wave of alien attacks.

If your worried about what the neighbours will think of you running around screaming incoherently about aliens fear not, Pandemica also has two multi-player modes where you can team up with a friend and fight cooperatively against the threat, or you can compete for the highest score. Pandemica is the first multi-player game of this type and it adds a new twist on the game play. If you can get a few friends together I think there is endless fun to be had with these modes.

Pandemica costs $1.99 or £1.19 and is available from the app store.

MMORPG Augmented Reality Game

Posted by augmentedplanet under General

In my daily scan of the iPhone application store I noticed that Parallel Kingdom -- Age of Emergence has arrived. It’s has also hit the the Google Android.

Parallel Kingdom is a massively multi-player online role playing game that takes place around you. The game uses GPS to figure out your location and places the character directly in your neighbourhood where you can explore, declare war on other players or just fight the many creatures that live there. It’s interesting to see your surroundings plotted with monsters, trees, caves and other exotic items. I had never noticed that there was a castle at the end of my street before.

I have only just installed the game and it seems to be pretty complex and loaded with options so it is going to take a while for me to figure out what the hell I am doing, but like all MMORPG’s the object is to kill, collect gold and build up your level.

Given it’s complexity it’s hard to give a full review but I guess the question is, is it really an augmented reality application? Well that depends on your point of view.

If you are a traditionalist who believes that augmented reality is defined by using the camera and blending computer graphics in the camera feed then you probably won’t see Parallel Kingdom as a true augmented reality game. If however you take the wider view and believe that augmented reality is being aware of you surroundings and enhancing them then you’ll see Parallel Kingdom as the first true augmented reality MMORPG. Either way, Parallel Kingdom is free so worth an install and making up your own mind.

Game Trailer

Augmented Reality In One Hour

Posted by augmentedplanet under General

A couple of weeks back O’Reilly hosted a webcast on augmented reality. The speaker was Chetan Damani CEO and Founder of acrossair who gave his take on what mobile augmented reality is and the future of acrossair including an update on new products.

Chetan also talks about the choices in selecting a platform and his plans for porting applications over to Android. It’s an interesting talk, the Q&A at the end has lots of questions on where the data comes from and how to manage the presentation of lots of data on the screen. So if you are planning on building an augmented reality application and want some tips from a company that have 10 augmented reality apps already in the iPhone store,  or if you are just generally interested in learning more about the technology then its well worth a listen.

Watch the webcast

FutureTek – Holographic Phones

Posted by Lester Madden under iphone

I stumbled on a spoof demo yesterday that showed an iPhone displaying a hologram. The idea was you receive a call and just like something out of a Star Wars film you see a hologram of the caller emerge from the screen. Of course it’s not possible but it got me thinking and I did a little bit of digging and found that to some degree you can create a hologram for the iPhone.

The first video is a rather ambitious look at the year 2012 but I think it will be more like 2020 before we see anything like this

iPhone 2012

Next is an interesting take on why it wont be a good idea to answer your holophone.

Finally to prove that there’s an app for just about everything, there is an hologram creator application for the iPhone. The images don’t leap out the screen but it’s still an interesting application.

Polymer Phone

Posted by Lester Madden under Smartphones

Fancy a phone you can roll up and put in your pocket?

Take a look at this