What am I not getting about AR games?

iOS
#1

I don’t know if I’m just old, or not imaginative enough, or lazy, or all of the above?! I just don’t get AR gaming yet. The only one that made sense to me was Pokemon Go.

Watching the Keynote this morning and seeing the Lego demo, and that other demo where they were knocking over wooden blocks, I just can’t help but wonder what this gives us that we don’t have already other than having to awkwardly hold my device at weird angles in front of physical objects and spaces?

Don’t get me wrong, I can see uses for AR of course. And having recently got hold of a Gear VR I can definitely see uses for VR too. But AR gaming just seems gimmicky so far. Maybe if I were to see something like Magic the Gathering or Dungeons and Dragons, which were traditionally played statically at a table, that’d click for me? I can see there being a mount on the table with your device in front of each player so you can see the virtual world while playing.

Can someone explain what I’m missing here?

2 Likes
#2

I was thinking much the same thing.

Maybe they’re trying to say “look at all the cool things you can do with this piece of hardware that fits in your hand”. Everyone oohs and ahhs at what they see, then nothing really materialises after that.

Slight tangent, but remember the Mario announcement? It was a big deal and everyone blew their load over being able to play it on an iPhone. It was released and forgotten about after a few days.

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#3

I think the technology is really impressive, but at the same time every time they zoomed out and showed the two guys on their iPads it just looked ridiculous. AR/VR will only become mainstream once you can put on a pair of glasses that look like a normal pair of glasses and use it that way. You can bet your bottom dollar both google and Apple are working their asses off to make such a thing reality.

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#4

Still waiting for this to appear in every arcade from here to Timbuktu…

Done well, AR can be really good.

I’m not going to walk around in public with my phone looking at augmented realities however…

#5

Well that’s a use case for AR I can get behind. The Google Maps AR demo at their recent conference was excellent! I can see heaps of good uses for AR in a mobile phone, tablet, but games just haven’t clicked for me yet.