Augmented Reality, wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I am pretty sure that doing image recognition on a gphone is still damn near infeasible in real time. At least, I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck doing it. This, of course, means that if Cram wants to use my app to LARP, he will either have to deal with unskinned weapons or cover his foam weapons with telephones.

rfid's would allow you to have a 'prop' in the real world and a 'object' in your app... Of course this assumes that all players have some minimum level of gear.

Namely, RFID detectors. I don't think that will work too well with smartphones, unfortunately. Any ideas for how that could be done with another technology? I would be interested in adding the ability to skin moving objects as well.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I am pretty sure that doing image recognition on a gphone is still damn near infeasible in real time. At least, I certainly wouldn't want to be stuck doing it. This, of course, means that if Cram wants to use my app to LARP, he will either have to deal with unskinned weapons or cover his foam weapons with telephones.

rfid's would allow you to have a 'prop' in the real world and a 'object' in your app... Of course this assumes that all players have some minimum level of gear.

Namely, RFID detectors. I don't think that will work too well with smartphones, unfortunately. Any ideas for how that could be done with another technology? I would be interested in adding the ability to skin moving objects as well.

No... that's why my initial thought was that such a system would need to be a "package". So basically "Virtual RPG Company" has all the hardware etc and travels from Con to Con charging people to play. That would cover for testing/debugging/tightening up the system and maybe have enough time for costs and technology to make it feasible to have a 'packet' that people can buy with everything included. (Have you seen the RFID readers that fit in the memory slot of any smartphone?)

My design was using wireless ethernet and 'netbook' type devices. So you could set it up at a Con and run it standalone.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

It occurs to me that some of these smartphones will have built-in code for reading 3d barcodes. Perhaps those routines can be called in place of the normal hand-coded routines for AR object glyphs.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

It occurs to me that some of these smartphones will have built-in code for reading 3d barcodes. Perhaps those routines can be called in place of the normal hand-coded routines for AR object glyphs.

Well, depending on the AR app... that might be workable. Again, though... your dependent on the user having the right hardware.

I was part of the 'Terrorwerks' team at Origins this year, they hit 6 or 7 big Cons every year and charge something redicilous for a 45 minute game ($20 or something like it). It's an itneresting model if a high tech LARP concept was developed... without staying with entirely generic technology which is going to seriously limit what you can do, having the technology and 'renting' it out as part of the game experience seems the most sane way to handle it.

Though by the time it gets developed enough to use, there might be another cool new gadget out there to fix this issue.

[Cramulus]

Terrorworks is basically laser tag, right?

See there's all sorts of games which can be played with very simple tech.


Assassin comes to mind.


so do obstacle courses, scavenger hunts, capture the flag, or any game where you have to move your meat-body into a zone to trigger something.



You could press a button to drop a bullseye on the ground which would be visible to other players. Then when someone who is playing walks onto the bullseye, you could press a button to drop a digital 20 Ton anvil on them.



more thoughts here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/blog/cramulus/web-games-in-meatspace/

[Cainad (dec.)]

Terrorworks is basically laser tag, right?

See there's all sorts of games which can be played with very simple tech.


Assassin comes to mind.

so do obstacle courses, scavenger hunts, capture the flag, or any game where you have to move your meat-body into a zone to trigger something.

You could press a button to drop a bullseye on the ground which would be visible to other players. Then when someone who is playing walks onto the bullseye, you could press a button to drop a digital 20 Ton anvil on them.

more thoughts here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/blog/cramulus/web-games-in-meatspace/

The idea alone makes me

It also seems to me that it would work well as a territory-grabbing game. Control city blocks for more mittens and win; establish the local bar as your base of operations and surround it with 20-ton Anvils on digital tripwires to deter would-be invaders.

[Kai]

Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg&fmt=6

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Terrorworks is basically laser tag, right?

No, its airsoft. Basically you have 'actors' with nerf guns that are dressed as Evil Aliens, Monsters... whatever and 'players' that get airsoft guns and a minimalist character sheet (loosely based on the Cthulhu Live system).

The players enter a 15,000 sq ft set and the story runs from there... including puzzle solving, dealing with 'first aid' once the attacks start etc.

See there's all sorts of games which can be played with very simple tech.


Assassin comes to mind.


so do obstacle courses, scavenger hunts, capture the flag, or any game where you have to move your meat-body into a zone to trigger something.



You could press a button to drop a bullseye on the ground which would be visible to other players. Then when someone who is playing walks onto the bullseye, you could press a button to drop a digital 20 Ton anvil on them.



more thoughts here: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/blog/cramulus/web-games-in-meatspace/

I like this idea a LOT!!

[Cainad (dec.)]

Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg&fmt=6

[Kai]

Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg&fmt=6

Yeah. And theres nothing really new about it. You've got a projector, a camera and a computer, and some color coded tips for your fingers.

I wonder how you could integrate typing into this though.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

The color-coded tip thing is probably doable with minimal image processing, though it will become problematic if anything in the environment is the same color. A lot of the things in the video, though, are all image processing -- which is terribly problematic in most cases. We can barely get readable text out of professionally scanned books, so many things in here (such as loading book info from the internet, loading a video from a newspaper, etc) would be nearly impossible to get working properly at a large scale without many glitches (and even then, things probably will only even be functional enough to use when they were designed with that purpose in mind). This is, of course, assuming that we can clear up the image and get clear gestures, which we may have trouble with -- as you could see in the video, when he was demoing the gesture recognition he was actively managing it in order to avoid screwing up (for instance, trying to stay VERY still while resizing the photos so that the camera could track his hands reliably).

It's a neat idea and all, but it seems pretty far away from any potential real-life application. If some poor sod picks it up and tries to use it across the board, it will probably suffer from either the problem with speaker-independent speech recognition systems (which you will find any time you try to work with a telephone tree that doesn't depend on tones) or the problem with handwriting recognition in early palm pilots and newtons (an overly complex system for writing which doesn't particularly resemble actual handwriting, is inflexible and finicky, terribly timing dependent, and essentially counters its own rationale of usefulness by asking the user to fundamentally retrain himself in that set of 'natural movements' the device was supposed to gain usability from).

[Triple Zero]

hmmm gutting a ball mouse and put the rolling thingies somewhere on the joints of your fingers you say? that sounds like it might actually work. and I have a bunch of ungutted ball mice. I think. maybe I threw them away after the fire.

also

UNGUTTED BALL MICE



anyway, and then yeah, you got a funky little two-finger glove thingy that is capable of [admittedly very accurately and low latency-y] sort of tracking the posture of your fingers.

then what.

WHAT I ASK YOU

WHAT?!!

[Cramulus]

somebody actually did that in the video kai posted

the mice were very sad 

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Dunno what the fyck kind of software to put in between the webcam input and the eye piece output though.

I'd have a play with this,  but, software? hmpfh. google earth street view with add in info mods is all I can think off, and thats kinda lame, and would only work in a wifi area.

I'd take a tip from the AR smartphone apps and get one of those cell-phone modem cards. In terms of software, video processing and image recognition is a lot nicer on a netbook, but the easiest thing would probably just be to turn your desktop background into a webcam preview and make all your windows translucent.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

A couple of things I have noticed from using AR so far:
(Heh, that rhymes)
1- For multiplayer games you wouldn't really need RFID chips. If you wanted to substitute that, you could use bluetooth or the wifi antenna. Most android phones have built in sensors that detect the position, orientation and movement of the phone, these sensors could be used to register swings and the location of the phone relative to other phones in the game. If you were close enough, you could have the phone roll dice or whatever to see what sort of damage you did. The accuracy of the GPS can be supplemented by the strength of the bluetooth signal.

2- The AR games I have played so far, while they're kind of fun because of the novelty, they really haven't matured. That said, I think AR has the potential for some really awesome games.

3- Most of the AR apps so far are cool, but kind of impractical. The two exceptions I've seen so far are Google Goggles and some of the features of Layar. Usually, I find myself using a regular mapping application when I want to find something.