Board games everywhere with VR/AR.
We will soon play Chess, Go, Catan, or any other table top board game anywhere.
Sitting at the patio table we decided to give the classic Chinese game Go a try. We were lucky to find a Go board via an app on the Google Play store. This allowed us to play Go from the comfort of our back porch with no need to purchase a physical game board. We instead passed a small smartphone screen back and forth to play our pieces.
To simplify the smartphone passing process we moved our chairs closer to each other. But what if we didn’t have to move our seats closer? What if we didn’t have to sit near each other at all?
With Augmented Reality, even Apple’s latest ARKit, we could remain in our seats and play a three dimensional game of Go together.
The board appearing for each of us in front of our eyes on the table. Perhaps sliding between us during our turns. The tracking of our hands, a la LEAP Motion, could detect the movements needed to pick up and place our pieces. A simple tap with a finger would work as well.
I pulled out my phone, turned on the Camera app, and imagined an ARKit game of Go being played through the screen.
Would I enjoy placing pieces while having to hold my smartphone as a lens? Would it make intuitive sense to view the game board through the smartphone’s screen? AR glasses would by all means be more intuitive, but holding up my phone was not as strange as I had initially thought.
We are all so used to holding our smartphones up given our daily use of them, it is not so strange after all to play games through them. Pokemon Go has made this abundantly clear given its popularity. Games like Chess or Go make for easy testing grounds for ARKit developers and enthusiasts.
A well designed ARKit game is future proof.
ARKit apps can be transferred to future iterations of AR/MR glasses, as well as into VR. An augmented reality game could find its way into a VR experience, just as a VR experience can turn into an augmented one. If you’re interested at all in Augmented or Virtual Reality, now is a great time to start testing assumptions.
Who will build the first words with friends in three dimensional space?
Off I go to throw together a quick Go prototype with Unity. Or should I use A-Frame?
This is post 49 of my 90 VR experiment. Join me here for a daily dose of virtual reality design, gameplay, speculation, and adventure.
