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Thursday, April 26, 2007

Augmented Reality For PS3

There hasn't been much in way of camera games to get me excited, but seeing something like this gets me pretty curious -



Eye of judgement is a pretty unique game and comes bundled with a camera stand, play mat and a deck of special characters, the USB camera is required for playing. To start with you place the card under the camera which has a unique 2D bar code which is read by the camera and turned into a detailed monster, each monster has its unique strengths and weaknesses. The game is played on a 3x3 map, and your goal is simply to occupy five of the nine squares on the grid simultaneously.
-- Eye of judgement for Playstation 3[Newlaunches.com]

So that hand and card is real, but the monster is generated by the game. Newlaunches.com has more pics at the link above. Augmented reality is a weird bastard son of virtual reality - essentially placing virtual object into real environments. While pretty nifty, I haven't seen a lot of applications that would make me thing it wouldn't have a similar future than VR - i.e. mostly a movie prop. This game might sway me a little though.

1 comment:

Greg Tannahill said...

Got to see this in person at last year's Tokyo Game Show. Granted they may have improved the tech since last August but when I saw it the camera/software seemed to take a little while to react to changes in the environment and updated quite slowly. Also, beyond the initial "cool, monsters on my hand", there didn't seem to be a lot to the gameplay. I was excited when I first heard about it, but less so once I'd seen it. It also seems to require a fairly large play area for you to put the cards in, which has to have the right properties to not confuse the camera, so you'll need the right sort of living room setup to really get it to work.