AUGMENTED REALITY GLASSES:
By design, the glasses include feature that: allow interaction to remain open, because game play space is not separate from the surrounding environment.
This opens the door for a variety of real-world gaming applications that we haven't seen yet. “We foresee a lot of games that could be possible, and would be social,” Ellsworth said. “It's a completely new game experience. I think a few existing games might work well to be retrofitted to work with this, and some games will be created.”
Technical Illusions is working to combine all the elements for developers to create games that are compatible with the glasses. “We have the glasses; we have input devices, such as a wand; and we have playing cards that use RFID to identify both the card's physical location in the space and what the card can do. We have figurine tracking, too,” Ellsworth said.
The Cast AR glasses could be used in card games and traditional analog role-playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons. Augmented reality, delivered in the manner proposed by Cast AR, could be the jump-start needed to help bring such analog games into the digital social game-playing age.
Hands-on
Gaming with Cast AR felt very natural and realistic. The glasses were lightweight and unobtrusive. While there were no shadows in the demos — so you couldn't ascertain certain aspects of how you're positioned relative to objects, — our game-playing experience felt like a smooth extension of our perceptions.
The Jenga-like block game we tried was highly responsive to our waves of the wand to topple blocks, and moving our head meant we could see above, below and around the surface upon which the blocks rested to. In many ways, the experience was reminiscent of the game that was the subject of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called “The Game.”
The gaming experience felt immersive, but didn’t cut us off from the world around us; we could have just as easily been sitting around a table viewing fellow human players around us and watching our avatars poised for battle with a horde of orcs.
We had no sense of disorientation when we moved our head, as can sometimes happen with other virtual-reality immersion headsets. Nor was there any issue with color shift — the LCOS projectors use color filter LCOS, so the color plane doesn't fall apart with movement, as can happen with other pico-projector technologies.
Ellsworth(developer) said the goal is to launch a Kickstarter campaign later this summer, but the timing is still not nailed down. The glasses, wand and playing surface will be sold as a set, for less than $200.
