Augmented reality is a rapidly growing trend in the gaming / graphics industry and I love seeing people push the limits of the technology. I’ve posted once or twice before about some basic prototypes that are out there, but this is really cool.

ARhrrr is a prototype game from the Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design. The game requires a hand held device equipped with a new graphics processing unit called the Nvidia Tegra and a tabletop map.

Once you start the game, the buildings pop up on the screen and zombies start to flood out of them into the streets, terrorizing innocent civilians that you need to rescue. You point the camera on the device towards the zombies using the on-screen crosshair and tap anywhere on the screen to shoot. The game incorporates the use of real-world objects, skittles in this case, as game elements such as bombs.

I love seeing the AR games, but what I find the most interesting is what’s coming in the future. Augmenting reality to the point where we see a Tom Tom arrow through our contact lenses while we’re hiking in the woods, or being able to look at a building and get the contact information for the businesses inside based on GPS location. Yeah, it’s going to be real sweet.

Tags: 3D, ar, augmented reality, georgia tech, nvidia, SCAD, skittles, tegra, video games, zombies

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Some Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.