It feels like developers have been trying to do something with augmented reality for years now. I’ve always been oddly excited for the technology, as the augmented reality dream is really cool. Imagine playing a game that uses your surroundings as the play field, or an app that uses your phone as a lens to view information about the world around you. On paper, it sounds rad as hell, but in practice it’s almost always really lame. Augmented reality games often require you to print something out for your camera to recognize, and apps like Yelp’s “monocle" functionality really just don’t work that great- It all ends up coming off as somewhere in between gimmicky and broken. This feels like the promise developers often make with augmented reality, when in actual reality, you usually just get some aliens overlaid on top of whatever your camera is seeing without actually augmenting reality at all.
Night Terrors aims to change that, with an augmented reality game that actually seems to be able to parse reality, and, well, augment it. It’s just an Indiegogo campaign now, but the important part is they’ve already developed the technology that pulls your reality into the game. It’s featured briefly in their pitch video, but here’s what the game is looking for as it’s building a map of your house:
You can see it analyzing doors and hallways, and after walking around for little more than a minute it’s already build a decent map of the area the game is being played in. This allows the developers to make things happen intelligently using the internal architecture of your house instead of just rendering a 3D model on top of where your camera detects a basic barcode.
It is a crowdfunding campaign, so cautious optimism is likely warranted here, but it’s powered by the dudes behind the classic (and incredibly popular) iOS puzzler Geared ($0.99)… So, that seems a lot better than just some random guys you’ve never heard of saying they’re going to do something cool.
