Augmented Reality

“Augmented Reality” is definitely on its way into our daily lives.

So, what exactly is Augmented Reality? The easiest way to explain AR is by using the fighter-pilot’s heads-up display as an example. In simplest terms it’s an ‘overlay’ on real life.

Of course, this has literally hundreds of applications. HUD displays in your car that warn you of threats and let you check your GPS without taking your eyes off the road. Spectacle-mounted displays for tourism that point out interesting sights or give you more information on what you’re looking at…and of course tactical overlays for the military. The same display that a fighter pilot gets on his aircraft in a helmet mounted display for the foot soldier.

Of course, this is Geekology, so I want to talk about the applications for gaming.

To do this, we have to go back in time.

Virtual Reality was an excellent idea. If you offered any gamer a pair of glasses that they plugged into their PC or console, so they could look around in an FPS just by moving their head, while using a separate gun peripheral to actually shoot, you’d struggle to keep up with demand.

It’s one of the things Nintendo’s Wii has proven. One of the main reasons more people don’t play games is because of the learning curve of the controls. If you sit an non-gamer in front of a FPS, chances are they’ll lose patience before getting the hang of it. On the other hand, an intuitive, natural peripheral removes (or at least lessens) that early learning curve.

Unfortunately, VR was introduced way ahead of its time. People simply didn’t want to have to wear an overly heavy headset to play a terrible looking game running at around 5 frames per second. The other big hardware limitation is the motion sensors took a while to catch up. Move your head too quickly, and your viewpoint would shift after your head had moved.

Long story short, you where asking a late-80’s computer to render a 3D world (twice, because each eye had a slightly different viewpoint to give the stereoscopic 3D effect), while tracking multiple motion sensors.

Unfortunately, VR went down in history as a failed experiment. A good few VR gaming centers popped up around the world, and they all went out of business. No one wants to spend money on something that was such a spectacular failure…especially when ‘traditional’ gaming is doing so well.

So despite the fact that the Wii has proven that motion sensors in a peripheral can work extremely well, and that we can now build VR headsets that aren’t much bigger or heavier than a regular set of glasses…it’s doubtful we’ll see VR in our homes any time soon…despite the average desktop PC or games console are more than powerful enough to support them.

However, this is why I see AR as being one of the ‘next big things’. AR for gaming uses similar technology to VR, but is different enough to convince the people with the money to invest in it.

So how would AR work with gaming?

I’ve described AR as an ‘overlay on real life’. So consider some of the possibilities of this.

The easiest one to imagine is a form of AR ‘paintball’. Paintball is great fun, but it has a few drawbacks. You need a fairly large group of people to actually play, it’s messy, it hurts when you get hit…and you’re stuck using a paintball gun.

So let’s look at the AR equivalent.

You can use normal, physical environments, or have obstacles and cover supplied by the AR system. You can play against other people or AR opponents…and the most exciting thing from a gamer’s point of view is that you can use a whole supply of real world or sci-fi weapons.

So, despite the fact you’re holding a generic looking plastic rifle, what you’re seeing in your hands is a full-on assault rifle, a star-wars blaster or a star-trek phaser rifle. When you fire it, you get the realistic sound played through headphones, and see the muzzle-flash, tracer rounds or ‘phaser beam’ coming from the end of your weapon.

With the use of special gloves you can pull a virtual grenade from your virtual belt and throw it at your enemy.

One thing you can’t do with traditional paintball is shoulder a rocket launcher and fire it at an on-coming tank and see a spectacular explosion. AR allows you a much more realistic experience, with the only chance of injury being a twisted ankle or falling over. While paintballs are definitely non-lethal…get hit in the eye (or the nuts) and you’re in a world of hurt. Getting hit with a virtual weapon, you’re literally getting hit with nothing, and that’s incredibly hard to get hurt with.

You may see a grenade land at your feet before going off with an ear-splitting explosion…but that only exists in the game.

In other words, what we’re looking at is the most realistic game in the world. If you see an enemy (virtual or otherwise) shoot at you or throw a grenade, you actually have to run like hell for cover. When you shoot someone, your AR display shows the hit, and informs you they’re out of the game.

Think about it. This is something you could play in any open area…or an elaborate set up in a theme-park style ‘AR center’ where only the weapons and special effects are AR.

Of course, there are some downsides. In order for AR to work in a given area, it has to know the layout of that area and be able to track you in it. In a purely open area, this isn’t a problem, all the kit would have to do is track your direction and speed of movement…but in a more built up area, you’d have enemies running through walls and shooting you through real world cover. I’m also sure that something so realistic (even if you’re using non-real world weapons), would have people like Jack Thompson foaming at the mouth about these new ‘murder simulators’.

On the upside, the technology is already there. It will be a while before anything like this will be available as a consumer product, but it shouldn’t be too long before something like this is available in places like commercial laser-tag arenas.

The main reason I see this technology eventually becoming commonplace is that it has a multitude of applications other than entertainment. It would be a great training aid for the Army, navigation aid for cars etc.

Basically, flight simulators started out as a military training application, and today we have flight simulators on our computers that are just as technically accurate as the air force has (minus the full-size cockpit and huge panoramic screens of course).

AR is in our future, and personally, I can’t wait.