The scene:

Little man has made it through the forest in pursue of a mighty treasure. Now, on top of a rocky peak, all there is left, is to cross a mighty crevasse to be set for life in wealth and fame! But what to do, the treasure seems so close but is yet so far!

Now this is the point where the player comes in, lending a divine hand by lifting a wooden board to form a bridge and let the little guy achieve his goal.

This is the next iteration of my experiments to come up with interesting use cases for AR and games. Apologies for the crappy web cam again, which makes the tracking just pop every now and then.

I want to explore, what game mechanics can be constructed around direct human interaction with a virtual world and characters within it.

This – again, is not really AR. It is a game I can play on my living room table. It does not interact with the real world, apart from waving around a marker. But it instantly felt quite captivating, having this small guy and his struggle and lending him – quite literally – a hand. As I’m doing this on a webcam that points towards me, so directions are reversed. If you look closely, I messed up and hit him in the head with the board after he crossed. And I did feel rather bad! Says something about immersion, I’d say.

Well this is a start. There are tons of things that can be improved, but as a prototype I found this quite informative.

The tech behind – in case you wondered – is once again Unity2018, vuforia and a bunch of amazing free 3D assets from the asset store.