ARhrrrr - An augmented reality shooter

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones, created at Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD-Atlanta). The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

One of the inspirations for this game was the game Joe Warpin, from our Handheld Augmented Reality games class (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62cbXp1rO6s ).

http://ael.gatech.edu/lab/research/handheld-ar/arhrrrr/
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/
http://www.scad.edu/atlanta/

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Closed Caption:

today we'll be showing you a different
kind of game an augmented-reality
shooter on a handheld device
this is a definite for the Tegra a
powerful new mobile platform from Nvidia
that supports high-end mobile graphics
there's a camera here in the back we're
going to use this to mix real-world
video with our 3d graphics this is the
essence of augmented reality or ar when
you first look at the map you'll see a
quiet town square
notice how the graphics stay locked on
the map as resume in and out and even as
we look down the streets
yeah
now we just need something to shoot well
how about some zombies
ok so we find ourselves in a helicopter
over the city and here come the zombies
see the cross hairs in the center of the
screen we target by moving the device
until it's over a zombie tap anywhere on
the screen to shoot and their got one
should carefully because if you miss the
zombies will start throwing things that
you will continue to throw things at you
until you move far enough away
this isn't the game that you play
sitting down it's meant to be dynamic
need to keep moving to kill the zombies
and to avoid the obvious throwing so
shooting zombies is fun but we need a
bit more purpose in life that's where
the civilians coming there's a portal in
the middle of the board that accesses
safe zone the civilians will try to get
to the portal to get out protect the
civilians by killing all the zombies if
the number of zombies becomes
overwhelming you can always grab a bag
of Skittles and using his bombs
place the skittle on the map and shoot
it to activate a bomb orange skittles
act like proximity bonds shoot to arm
the bomb then wait for a zombie to come
by and set it off
careful because civilians can also set
off the bombs and they will be instantly
killed by the blast green skittles going
to be before use shoot at once and wait
for the signal the particle field will
change from red to green when it's ready
she did it again to set it off
those are the basics of the game each
round asks you to save a certain number
of civilians were getting points for
killing zombies you also get points for
health and ammo left at the end of the
round
our primary motivation for this game was
to explore they are from a first-person
perspective camera controls that would
typically require massive keyboard are
handled by simply moving the device this
is both natural and highly interactive
control system and is perfectly suited
for handhelds leverage the graphics
capabilities of the Tegra 4 things such
as dynamic lighting here we've taken the
world including the video feed and
darkened now we use the device is a
spotlight to find the zombies
we also perform skinning in the GPU
which allows us to animate many
characters simultaneously still maintain
30 frames per second
even with the technical constraints of
mobile platforms we've created a game
that performs well and more importantly
is fun to play
it's a new experience that our users
have picked up quickly and enjoyed right
away