Since before the days of Doom, first-person shooter fans have wanted to take the carnage into familiar locations from the real world. In the past, this has required some level of hand-crafted 3D modeling or texture replacement to create a virtual facsimile of your environment. Computer vision company 13th Lab has what it thinks is a better method, using the smartphone to create an augmented reality shooter that's easily overlaid over a live image of your surroundings.

The company has just launched the Kickstarter funding effort for Rescape, its vision for an entire augmented-reality shooter platform built on this idea. Players stick a specially designed lens on top of their phone's camera, then put the phone onto the end of a vaguely gun-like plastic shell (which looks and feels a bit like the Wii Zapper). As you walk around the room, the phone's display shows the scene in front and lets you aim and shoot at virtual opponents layered on top.

A quick demo of Rescape from the GDC 2014 show floor.

Plenty of other game developers and technology companies have come out with similar augmented reality overlays, of course, with varying levels of success. What sets Rescape apart, besides the gun-style holder, is what the company is selling as an extremely simple method it has created for crafting a 3D model of the environment that can be navigated by AI opponents.

Basically, as you quickly move around the room, the system's algorithms stitch together frames from the smartphone camera with gyroscope data to create a rough model of the environmental hazards. The method builds on technology created by NASA that 13th Lab has been working on for other purposes for the last five years, the company said.

"We call this reality gaming, where you actually map a game on top of your real world walls and ceiling," 13th Lab cofounder Petter Ivmark told Ars during a demo at the Game Developers Conference today. "There's a process where you have to walk around the space once, then the software understands how it looks, makes a simple 3D reconstruction of the space, then that's used to map a game on top of that.... From the user's perspective, it's going to be a minute in your apartment walking around it, and then you're going to be able to play. And that can be translated from one game to the next, you don't need to do it over again."

Unfortunately, 13th Lab wasn't demonstrating this most-interesting part of the Rescape system at GDC today. Instead, it showed off a motion-controllable version of the original Quake that it said was integrated with its libraries in just a couple of hours. 13th Lab says this option should work on any mobile FPS, while actual augmented reality games will have to be developed specifically with the Rescape API in mind (the platform will launch with one game, Office Defender, developed by 13th Lab itself).

As I walked and jogged around the crowded conference floor, smartphone propped in front of me at the end of its holder, the in-game Quake perspective followed along with my movements fairly well. Waving the gun-controller around in place to change my view was relatively responsive (Ivmark cites 60 frames per second display rates with 3 ms latency in the position tracking), but the game frequently got confused and stopped accurately tracking my physical position. Ivmark said the system is designed for more static environments and might have gotten confused by the high number of people walking around the show floor (other players using the system can supposedly show up as avatars in the augmented reality display, though).

I also ran into trouble when I came up against the conference center walls in the real world but wanted to continue walking forward in the game (a problem that shouldn't exist in the Rescape games that will be overlaid over the real world environment). The Rescape controller will have a thumb-activated D-pad to solve this problem, but it wasn't yet integrated into the demo unit we tried, and it also seems to somewhat ruin the whole point of the motion-controlled system.

While we can't offer even a preliminary assessment of Rescape's augmented reality experience, we're at least intrigued by the idea of turning real-world surroundings into a fully navigable shooter map. We should know soon enough how well the company has succeeded in its efforts; if funded, 13th Labs says the first prototypes should be going out next month, with a wider launch to all backers in August and September.