Students from Georgia Tech and Savannah College Of Art & Design have created an augmented reality simulator, called ARhrrrr, to help prepare you for the coming miniature zombie invasion. The simulator (some, naively, call it a “game”) uses a real-world, two dimensional, board as the playing field. A Nvidia Tegra powered experimental device uses a camera and sophisticated 3D hardware to create a three dimensional city on top of the game board. Looking through the LCD on the device, players can look around the now-3D buildings and see an army of Zombies walking through the city streets. Players are able to shoot the zombies by tapping the screen, and prevent their infiltration. You really have to watch the video to see this gameplay. In the event of a miniature zombie uprising, it is comforting to know that the citizenry will be so well trained in handling the situation.

The simulator has the ability to recognize objects beyond the predesigned game board. The video (it’s here, if you haven’t already seen it) shows a player dropping a skittle onto the board, which is recognized by the system as a bomb and treated accordingly in the game. It is easy to imagine all kinds of potential uses for this type of object recognition software, from marketing to manufacturing. It might not be too long until Ikea furniture comes with a mobile app that would recognize each piece and tell you what to do with it. Cut lines and measurements could be overlaid onto raw materials for more advanced manufacturing and construction projects. Billboards could be recognized by smartphones, and pull up additional information and media if the viewer was interested. Of course, like most new technologies, the killer app of augmented reality will likely be something completely unexpected.

Augmented reality is not just a pet project for engineering students, it is already being used in software for Android smartphones. Wikitude adds an information layer to the Android camera, pulling in content from Wikipedia as well as user-added content, as the user walks through a city. Enkin has an interesting concept video for their Android augmented reality application, which can recognize buildings and landmarks. The iPhone 3GS has hardware capable of enabling similar apps, but Apple has not yet provided APIs for accessing, processing, and manipulating raw camera data.

We should all consider ourselves lucky that we have such powerful tools to train us for the coming zombie insurrection, and whatever other uses we can think of for this technology.

Click Here For Video Of ARhhhhh Gameplay

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Tags: augmented reality, gaming, mobile

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