Augmented Social Shoot… Gaming!

Hey everybody,

no, we are not yet there to be so fed up with facebook, etc. to shoot these. We are talking about the usual situation of FPS gamers sitting all day in front of the screen, meeting with their friends virtually to frag some foes or to decide who has to do the dishes. This can finally be broken up and ported to the real world with your buddies. We’ve seen quite a few mobile AR games during the last year and we’ve seen Urban Troops with a concept marketing video last year. Their team has the vision to “create a game which would encourage people to go out, meet with friends, get away from Facebook, computer or console. On the other side, we didn’t want to completely cut the gamers off of their favorite pastime.” The old trailer sure made us wait eagerly:

After concepts and betas they now seem to have matured to officially release the game to the mobile world! To quote from their fresh press release from this week: Urban Troops is the very first production of Future Reality Games, in which achievements strongly depend on various abilities of the players, such as speed, agility, sense of direction, stamina and… number of friends. The game uses crucial elements of augmented reality – layering graphics on the image registered by mobile phone’s camera, a GPS, an electronic compass. These features make Urban Troops resemble Counter Strike, Call of Duty and Battelfield at the same time, only this game takes place in non-virtual reality. Let’s take a look at the last in-game teaser:

Seems like positioning is completely done via compass and GPS, relying on Google maps for the “levels”.
It’s now freely available on Google Play, requiring Android ver. 2.2. or newer. Check their page for news.

In a first test it looked pretty sweet, reacting fast with well done graphics and music. Unfortunately I’ll first need some friends to come over to give it a proper go with enemies or allies. I’m wondering how accurate locations will work and if I will be able to shoot through walls. If you already played it, please let us know your experiences in our augmented.org social world comments! Looks promising, but can’t judge about it now. Imagine in only a short period of time we can run around with cheap HMDs like the Rift to immersive in our parallel play worlds. :-)

Coming up Dates

Regular’s Table

Our next regular’s Table will take place in Munich, next Tuesday, September, 4th!
Feel free to join us in the restaurant (shaky weather in Germany now) for a beer and chat on AR!

Augmented Planet 2012 Conference

Augmented Planet is having it’s next installation of their AR conference, this year in London on October, 30th & 31st 2012. You can now register and check out their programs online. Early birds get a discount until tonight!

If you’re a developer, brand, digital agency or just have passion for augmented reality then this is the years must attend event.

Topics will include: Image recognition, face tracking, augmented reality, development, marketing, case studies and much much more.

Book your place at this 2 day augmented reality event before August 31st and take advantage of our early bird ticket for just £29 Full event price £59.

Let’s further quote Lester Madden from AP on the idea of the 2-day event: Augmented Planet 2012 isn’t just 2 days of seminars. Delegates will have the opportunity to get involved with our HackAR and team up with developers, designers, and creatives to create AR applications. As an attendee you can also take part in DemoAR and present your app, solution or technology (or propose a talk). Augmented Planet 2012 is hands-on as well as informative.

metaio’s insideAR

metaio’s annual conference will happen again during the best time of the Bavarian year (the Oktoberfest) and will give us two days of the latest cutting edge developments from their growing AR studios. First information can be found on their conference page. Again, the Eisbach Studios in Munich are the place to be on October, 1st and 2nd! Be sure to register. I will sure be!

So much for now. I’m heading off for my holiday and augmented.org will have a 3-week-break. But be sure to join me for news in late September and October, also blogging on the above conferences directly!

Have a great time & stay tuned!

– Toby