Augmented Reality, wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

I have an Android phone, so far my favorite AR game is this ghost hunting game where you have to run around and hunt ghosts before the time runs out. I haven't played many games yet though.

[Requia ☣]

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/

So nethernet played on the real world instead of the web?

Hell, you could do that right now, any smartphone that has GPS and minimal web should be able to do it.  Why wait for the fancy glasses?

[rong]

does anyone have any thoughts on AR and what it means to be psychotic?  i.e. if a person has trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality already . . . how does AR play into it? 

also - i was thinking it would be kind of neat if there was some sort of credibility app.  sort of like an ebay seller rating.  so you could tell if complete strangers were cool or not based on there "cred" rating.

[Jasper]

AR Idea:  What if, using a smartphone or something, you could leave virtual graffiti on physical surfaces, or floating in the air?  What about leaving secret notes places that only a certain phone can see?  What about ARGs that incorporate smartphones?

[Jasper]

My brand of futurology is shit I want to exist that I am pretty sure is possible and profitable.

[Chief Uwachiquen]

AR Idea:  What if, using a smartphone or something, you could leave virtual graffiti on physical surfaces, or floating in the air?  What about leaving secret notes places that only a certain phone can see?  What about ARGs that incorporate smartphones?

Brilliant! I fucking love that idea! Someone make this happen, with haste!

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

AR Idea:  What if, using a smartphone or something, you could leave virtual graffiti on physical surfaces, or floating in the air?  What about leaving secret notes places that only a certain phone can see?  What about ARGs that incorporate smartphones?

Layar can kind of do this with Tweeps Around (local twitter) and a couple of art apps. Not sure how customizable the art apps are though. Also, there's a program called Block Chalk for WebOS and OS X mobile (iPhone) that lets users post local messages.

[Jasper]

Can I affix horrible photos to billboards and advertisements?  That's kind of a deal-breaker.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

Wow, apparently there are a lot more than I thought.

It looks like there are a few Layar apps that will let you upload photos, so yes you can.

Also, I'm still not sure if the 3D models in the art apps are loaded by the programmer or by users, but if you could upload your own that would also fall under your requirements for awesome.

[Jasper]

This is intensely erotic to me.

[Golden Applesauce]

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.

Then don't do image recognition on the gphone - do it on the Cloud server of some kind.  I'm pretty sure Google is working on some kind of image recognition technology for its image search; presumably they'll figure it out at some point and make it available through the Google Cloud.

I think the key, though, in the early stages of this is to work with what you have, which is GPS.  Running a territory-based game should be pretty easy - just meatspace Monopoly around a city block, with the AR showing names, prices, hotels, and borders on each property would be pretty sweet.  The Diplomacy board game would be pretty cool as well.

For LARP-like games, if you could pipe what the players are seeing back to a GM, and allow the GM to communicate back with speech and visuals, that also has a lot of potential.  I imagine the GM sitting in front of a dozen monitors, each displaying what's in front of each of his players as they're spread out over a city.  The GM then could handle the image recognition - "See the hubcap I just highlighted?  That's the mirrored shield of Jason."  I guess all that really allows the GM to do is run a delocalized game from a central area.... I dunno, never LARPed much.

[Cramulus]

I don't see LARP meeting AR on the smartphone in an extremely visual way. If I'm pretending my opponent's pool noodle is actually a sword, it doesn't get more believable if I have to stare at a phone to make the illusion work.

In terms of LARP, the smartphone is probably better for doing things like keeping track of your character card, detecting what territory you're in, giving you a map of other player locations, instructing you to do certain things.

Your smartphone might be like Navi, the little fairy that follows around Link in the 3D zelda games. It tells you "that guy in front of you is higher level than you," or "Getting warmer ... you are within 100 feet of a magic node." Or if you're NPCing it might say "Here are your stats, go touch the check point and respawn." Once the heroes finish the spell at the magic node, the LARP engine texts the NPCs to say "stop respawning".

In a more social game, the smartphone could be used to regulate things like voting. I imagine a game where the players are the equivalent of the senate in a fictional world. The game software generates a news feed of current events, and you and the other players have to discuss it and then vote in a way which resolves (or exacerbates!) those issues. The smartphone clears up the proximity issue - that the people playing these roles might be spread out all over the world. If the plotline dovetails with real world events, we've created an interesting alternate reality that doesn't require a physical presence to maintain.

I really do like the idea of the smartphone as a means of annotating the world. Similar to the annotated web, you could leave notes and diary entries and images littered all over the planet for others to discover. The world we are exploring is not quite physical, not quite digital, but somewhere in between.

[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.

Then don't do image recognition on the gphone - do it on the Cloud server of some kind.  I'm pretty sure Google is working on some kind of image recognition technology for its image search; presumably they'll figure it out at some point and make it available through the Google Cloud.

I think the key, though, in the early stages of this is to work with what you have, which is GPS.  Running a territory-based game should be pretty easy - just meatspace Monopoly around a city block, with the AR showing names, prices, hotels, and borders on each property would be pretty sweet.  The Diplomacy board game would be pretty cool as well.

For LARP-like games, if you could pipe what the players are seeing back to a GM, and allow the GM to communicate back with speech and visuals, that also has a lot of potential.  I imagine the GM sitting in front of a dozen monitors, each displaying what's in front of each of his players as they're spread out over a city.  The GM then could handle the image recognition - "See the hubcap I just highlighted?  That's the mirrored shield of Jason."  I guess all that really allows the GM to do is run a delocalized game from a central area.... I dunno, never LARPed much.

I wish google was that cool. For serious. I also wish I had the bandwidth and cycles to waste on a server dedicated to doing nothing all day but receiving images from cell phones and responding with some unique or semi-unique identifier.

something about psychosis and augmented reality something

I get the impression that normal ARGs (especially early ones like Majestic) are far more dangerous for psychotics. They don't rely on you looking through something's screen in order to be stuck into an alternate reality -- they rely upon the Masquerade, and generally tap into existing methods of defending totally unfounded beliefs about the phenomenal world in order to maintain suspension of disbelief.

[Triple Zero]

Cram, wouldn't a smartphone+GPS basically allow a LARP to take place without the GM (or arbiter? what are they called in LARPs?) actually having to be present at the location?

As well as automating certain things.

Like keeping track of someone's "health bar" and then if a nearby player presses a button on the smartphone to cast Fireball, it'll keep track of the area of effect and calculate damage.

I dunno I suppose a regular LARP doesn't have that much GM influence cause they can't be near the action all the time, and you'd need several to cover the playground, and what I experienced from multiple-DM tabletop RPGs is that communication between the DMs becomes an issue.
We once did a one-weekend campaign with the group split in two, playing in different rooms of the appartment, and the DMs communicating via MSN or IRC. The players could only communicate if they were in the same game-location of course. It was still a bit cumbersome, though. Cause whenever the DMs had to consult eachother the game would halt as they spent a minute typing/chatting on their laptops.

Did the advent of mobile phones change a lot of things for LARPs? I assume the GMs would call eachother now and then to inform them of events happening on the playground? [I also assume that players in a regular LARP are not allowed to use their phones while in character, of course]

[Cramulus]

really depends on the game.

In really broad terms, the GM's job is to facilitate the players actions in a way that becomes a plotline or story. The GM might coordinate NPCs to play specific roles, or set up rewards to encourage certain types of behavior. (ie getting treasure from killing monsters, or creating things for players to cooperate/compete over) But this stuff really could be automated or automatically generated.

Without going too far into LARP theory, yes, a smartphone could remove the need for a GM in certain types of games.