22 October 2008

Augmented Reality Demo
Is Now Available For Free Download

I’m happy, proud and excited to inform you that first Demo verion of the Augmented Reality Game For S60 Devices is annouced over at our forum section and available for download! This great news for real gamers because it promisses to bring natural feel of gaming and virtual reality (literally) to your hands!

Mobile Augmented Reality, or "mobile AR", is a combination of AR and mobile computing technology on mobile phones. Mobile phone's applications can use both fiduciary marker and markerless video tracking for image registration and insertion of 3d or 2d virtual objects into camera frame.

A number of games have been developed to show how augmented reality can support gaming, and how these games benefit from interactive three-dimensional computer graphics and high-quality manipulation but as far as I know this is the first implementation to Augmented Reality with Symbian S60 3rd edition devices! MirageMoney is indeed based on similar idea but this si something completely different.

Augmented reality game uses the main camera to capture the real world and to put user in the middle of the action with an unlimited and intuitive freedom of movement. The core technology is based on the image processing and algorithms that utilize the phone camera together with user movements and translate them to commands that control the UI.

Game is based on the camera motion flow tracking techniques and in combination with advanced image processing algorithms transforms the phone camera into a movement sensitive game controller enabling the player to interact with objects in the real world and offers new experience of realism and gameplay to mobile phones.

Cameras are now an essential feature of the standard mobile phone and this is the very promising technology and I guess that we can expect a whole new generation of mobile games if the technology will be able to identify and interpret complex human gestures on the right way in the real time.

mkak: Most of the code is written in the fixed point anyway, so the difference in performance is minimal, if there is any. Consider this alpha version, so some crashes expected. The demo should work for FP3 with scerrn 320x240. It may work with other screen resolution too, but would be ugly.