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‘Angry Birds: Isle of Pigs’ AR Version Will Fly Exclusively to iPhone This Spring

The people at Rovio who dreamed up Angry Birds were either sent back from the future or just stumbled into the perfect game mechanic for AR. Seriously, flinging things via slingshot was just made for layering an imaginary world of bird vs. pig combat over the rather more mundane real world, which is exactly what Angry Birds: Isle of Pigs is all about.

So far, it’s been a VR experience playable on headsets like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive, which means that relatively few people have been able to experience it. That’s about to change, however, with TechCrunch reporting that the AR version of Angry Birds: Isle of Pigs will get a spring release on iPhone.

A quick refresher: VR (virtual reality) means the game takes place completely within a digital world, whereas AR (augmented reality) refers to digital and physical coexisting and kind of, sort of interacting, with Pokemon GO the most famous example to date on mobile.

You can see in the trailer below why AR is actually so perfect for Angry Birds that it almost feels like the franchise was headed in this direction from the start — though that can’t possibly be, unless, as we said, time travel is involved.

As for what else we know right now, the game is being developed by Resolution Games, partly because Rovio doesn’t have the necessary AR experience in-house. It will be free-to-play and thus almost certainly have IAPs of some sort. Android users will have to wait, at least for the time being. And it has some levels repeated from its VR predecessors, but again, since not that big a chunk of the potential audience on mobile has played those, that shouldn’t be a big deal.

If you’re pumped by the idea of seeing Angry Birds whiz by your furniture, it’s going to be on the App Store for pre-order literally any minute now, or already there depending on when you’re reading this.