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Interestingly Awkward AR Games You Should Try Out
Before the advent of VR games, developers tried to improve the real world by adding floating, high-tech tracking add-ons to the physical. And all this with just a smartphone camera. Augmented Reality Games (ARGs) have been around for a while, and their designs and complexities have made them look even more immersive. However, running about with your smartphone camera or AR headset, pointing at imaginary objects that you can see, can look funny to others. Here are a few of the most awkward AR Games you'll ever play.
Ingress Prime
Formerly known as Ingress, this app developed by Niantic has been downloaded more than 20 million times. The game is free to play and also supports in-app purchases. What is it like?
Your mobile device is a scanner, and you’re presented with a map of your surrounding area. Gamers must be near objects on the map to interact with them. The scanner represents the player as a small arrowhead in the center of a circle representing the perimeter within which direct interaction is possible. A player can only see his location and nobody else’s. There are teams or factions. In the game, there are several portals, and players can claim those portals for their factions by hacking them.
When three portals are in a triangle, they form a control field, linking all the minds within that space (exactly like mind control). And get this, the largest control field formed had points between Germany, Greece, and Ukraine, took four months to create, and involved over 200 players!
Do Not Touch
A game for kids? Well, many adults have reportedly enjoyed playing it too. Straight from Nickelodeon, the game features are straightforward. You point your camera at a well-lit surface, and a big button comes up with the warning- Do Not Touch. Everyone does. Everyone touches, and the game comes to life with many features, from the very exciting to the uniquely bizarre.
The app makes Nickelodeon's iconic "Do Not Touch" button; the animations and interactive experiences it randomly generates seem to appear in a user's surroundings when viewed through their camera. Moving the smartphone allows the users to enjoy the action from different angles on the screen, and tapping characters and objects reveal more surprises.
The Walking Dead: Our World
Based on AMC’s popular series, this AR game is another one to try out. In this game, you’ll hack and shoot walkers with an armory of weapons, rescuing survivors and recruiting heroes, including a few fan favorites from the long-running series.
You can participate in this game alone or with a group. As an apocalypse expert knows, the zombies never stop coming. You have to clear out walkers three times in a row, but they respawn after eight hours. The game could be played from the comfort of your living room. But you could play it out in the open as with other AR games, as it is geo-based, the zombies are laid on in actual World streets, and you have to gun them down while collecting rewards simultaneously.
Gamers with their phones hunting down imaginary objects look funny and out of place, but the situation is quickly understood as AR gamers are becoming increasingly popular.
Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir
Horror, this time. Not particularly an adventure or action like the others. Imagine ghosts and manners of ghouls invading your home. You are looking at your screen, and a ghost jump at you; such an experience is harder to forget than your normal AR.
The game’s bizarre storyline involves a girl called Maya who has been lurking in the gloom of an old house, cursed by a malevolent woman. To free Maya from the curse, players must use the “diary of faces” – a 16-page AR notebook included with the game – to view ghostly images and interact with the world Maya is trapped in.
Father.io
Tagged one of the coolest gaming concepts of the decade, this game converts your whole surroundings into a giant battle arena. It can be played among friends, family, or rival gangs, all in real-time. It comes with an AR laser tag allowing you to hit your opponents from as much as a 50m distance.
You can locate your teammates and your enemies via an advanced real-time GPS location system within the radar and the satellite map. As with shooter games and the like, the sight of people pointing their phones at each other and trying to dodge imaginary bullets is a weirdly funny sight.
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