Are you a fan of augmented reality? If you are, there’s a new game out on the iPad called Ball Invasion by Swedish company 13th Labs. It’s basically a shooter game that uses your surroundings as the battle field.What’s amazing about the game is the fact that it uses highly complex computer techniques that NASA has been known to use for their robots and their Mars Rover. The technique is known as SLAM – Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, which allows an object (in this case, the iPad) to look around, build up a picture and understand where it is.
The technique is advanced enough to the point where pointing your iPad at a wall, will actually allow you to “bounce” the balls in the game off the wall, like how you would an actual physical ball.
Now rather than looking to make the next Angry Birds iOS game, 13th Labs actually has grander plans, which is to take the technology and turn it into a platform for other developers who may not have had the skills necessary to recreate something similar. We had recently reported that Apple filed a patent which suggested that they might make use of augmented reality in the future, so will Apple be coming up with something of their own, or will they be taking a leaf out of 13th Labs’ books?
Filed in . Read more about Augmented Reality (AR), Games, iPad and NASA.