Augmented reality (AR) refers to the ability to overlay digital information onto the physical world. AR has the potential to become an important computing platform, creating new markets and disrupting older ones in the same way as early personal computers and mobile smart-phones. Observing the history of computer interface evolution, the trend is that market widened as the user interface became more intuitive. When computers were rst being used they required special knowledge of the command line, whereas now most people can learn how to use most of the functionality of a computer without any training. AR creates a new and more intuitive was to interact with computers. The interface controls become gestures and graphics that people are instinctively familiar with. Further, AR gives a wider field of view, wherein the computer display becomes one’s entire physical environment or even just within the palm of your hands.
The Microsoft Hololens is an AR headset developed by Microsoft; the development version of the device was released in 2016 with a consumer version not yet announced. The core features of the Hololens are the ability to detect a user’s gaze, gestures, voice, the direction of sounds, the user’s physical surroundings, as well as the ability to share hologram interaction experiences between multiple devices.
The goal of this project was to create a Hololens application that utilizes all of the basic features of the Microsoft Hololens augmented reality platform as a way to learn and explore the technology to potentially develop more sophisticated applications in the future. To this end, I decided to develop an AR game.
My main reasons for choosing a game as the goal of the project is that video games are predicted to be the leading industry in the development of consumer markets for VR/AR technology. Making a game also allows the freedom to make use of all of the interesting features of the Hololens without having to put as much consideration into its practicality.
The development process for this project is divided into milestones to denote different phases of development. Each milestone is broken down into features or tasks that should be accomplished within those milestones. The following describes our vision of how the game will play with the assumption that two devices are being used as well as brief list of the milestones and tasks associated with each milestone.
The game itself is intended to play as follows: A main player (P1) starts the game and invites a second player (P2) who then shares the same holographic overlay on the world as P1. At the start, each player has a small ball hologram floating in front of them and there will be a medium-sized bucket hologram in front of P1. P1 can then pick up the bucket (using a gesture) and move it anywhere in the physical space that has been mapped by the Hololens.
Once the bucket has been moved to a location chosen by P1, P1 gives a voice command to start the game. Once this happens, each player can pick up the ball in front of there faces and they each get one chance to toss the ball into the bucket. If both players can toss their ball into the bucket, the game is too easy, no points are given, and a menu pops up for each player offering a selection of moving ad nonmoving obstacles, of which they can each pick one and place somewhere in the environment. This continues until at least one person fails and one succeeds. The idea is that each player wants to make the course difficult for the other player, but possible for themselves. I believe that this mechanic is a good way for the difficulty of each game to scale to the users’ abilities.