No game for couch potatoes!

David Arenou from the design school from Nantes, France, wrote his diploma on video games and immersion and did a pretty impressive job writing an action game to be played like the Wii combined with Microsoft’s Natal. As a design student he wanted to focus on the concept and design of course – not on the hardware implementation of a new infrared or time-of-flight tracking system. And that’s where Augmented Reality comes in handy! He uses markers to integrate real life furniture into the game (making them obstacles to take cover behind), define buzzers (a button to be pushed to open a door, etc.) and to track his own position. But now take a look:

DIPLOMA : Immersive Rail Shooter from David Arenou on Vimeo.

So the actual game is an immersive virtual reality game with different controllers (Wii and marker), so AR is “only” in there to set up the playground. But maybe in a later version this idea could be extended to get a more accurate representation of real life objects to further mix the two worlds. A camera is connected easily to show it in AR (as David does during the setup), but for this gameplay concept the augmented mirror doesn’t make too much sense. It’s better to shoot through a window (like it is done here) than onto a mirror. I just love the game. David? If you read this: could you drop me the binaries, so I can try it out? :-) I got my Wiimote and my markers prepared!

Check out his rendered concept video, too!

… and let there be multi player! :-)