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ARhrrrr!

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones. 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.

By merging graphics with props in the physical world, handheld Augmented Reality games pull the player through the small screen and into a larger merged play-space. Our primary motivation for this AR game was to explore fast-action first-person augmented reality, where the camera controls and movement that would typically require a mouse and keyboard are handled directly by simply moving the device. Advanced tracking technology allows the player to quickly zoom in and out and view the world at steep angles, making this a highly interactive and engaging game. Finally, we wanted to test tangible input mechanics, such as placing and shooting Skittles to trigger in-game events.

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  1. How about getting this game onto Windows Mobile? The HTC Touch HD2 has a snapdragon processor rated at 1 GHz, a 5mp camera, and 480×800 wvga resolution. Superior specs to the iPhone 3gs, and more importantly no Apple approval process for Windows Mobile apps.

      • admin on November 25, 2009 at 10:15 am
        Author

      It is running on Windows Mobile, actually; the Tegra dev kit runs version 6.5. Unfortunately, (a) I don’t have any high end production WinMo phones like the HD2, (b) we don’t have a license for the natural feature map tracker to use on any other platform, and (c) we have no funding to do such a port.

      BTW, the appeal of the iPhone is the store; porting to any other platforms makes no monetary sense till there’s a proven market. In this case, if some big company wanted to fund a student to do the port to another platform, I could probably find a student to do it.

    • kralikba on January 8, 2010 at 1:37 pm

    Do you think that a GoForce 5500 with a PXA270 would be able to run this game? There is 1 pocket pc, the XDA Flame out there having this video accelerator (and I happen to have one such device).

      • admin on January 12, 2010 at 11:59 pm
        Author

      No, such a machine is far too weak to run the game. Sorry.

    • Laura on January 11, 2010 at 11:23 am

    Loved the video and the idea. We would be interested in posting the video demo under Inventions on our HandBookLive site. Let me know if we can do it. I see that you make your avi file available for download, but we would still need your direct permission to post.
    Good luck with this project! Get these kids off the couches 🙂

    • najey on April 1, 2010 at 8:06 am

    where can i buy one?

      • admin on April 1, 2010 at 10:01 am
        Author

      Right now, nowhere. There will be Tegra powered phones coming out (probably this year), but it’s unlikely the game itself will get ported to any of them.

    • Ahmed on May 2, 2010 at 2:38 pm

    Any change at the moment?
    Can it work on HTC HD2?
    Please sell it for WinMo , I buy it willingly.

      • admin on May 4, 2010 at 9:43 am
        Author

      Nothing yet … there’s a chance we’ll be porting to Android later this summer, actually, for one of the highend phones. But nothing firm yet.

    • Rick Nelson on June 25, 2010 at 5:20 pm

    The new Android phones with the 1ghz Snapdragon processors should be able to handle this app. Any chance that it will be released soon?

      • admin on June 25, 2010 at 5:25 pm
        Author

      There is a chance; is there any real interest? It actually might be possible.

    • ahmed on July 10, 2010 at 4:51 pm

    Hello Blair
    I have WinMo device – HTC HD2 – I would be very happy to test it, if you want .

    • porl85 on July 10, 2010 at 7:07 pm

    im very interested, would happily test!!

    please release!

    • Glynn on July 15, 2010 at 6:22 am

    where can i get the game to play it?

    • T.Shell on August 8, 2010 at 9:00 am

    I would love to see this on the android side of the house. I’ve got a Samsung Galaxy S and got the phone to use AR games. I’ve been wanting this game for over a year. By fare the best AR game concept right now. You put this game out or start to generate some PR for a product like this. It would be huge! Don’t even get me started on the possibility of multiplayer. I’d love to test and or spread the word of this kick@$$ concept.

  2. Camera phones are in great demand these days, i own at least two of them`”;

    • Shane on August 19, 2010 at 3:44 pm

    I also just got the Galaxy S (Captivate variant) and came across this while doing some searching for AR stuff. This looks like a load of fun. I wish there was more AR projects out there, or if there are I wish they were easier to find.

    • H. Roberts on September 20, 2010 at 2:17 pm

    I just picked up a Droid 2 and would love to see this released.

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    • JRich on October 27, 2010 at 3:28 pm

    Game so it runs on the Iphone 4 ? Cause i think if you make it run through the A4 Processer, (wich is also used in the Ipad) you can make thousends of dollars 😉

    Imagine that cool Game running on the big screen of the Ipad.

    However. You guys did some really nice work there. Keep it up !

      • admin on November 30, 2010 at 7:19 pm
        Author

      Hardware-wise, there’s no reason it couldn’t run on the iPhone4; but, the software required to make it work (especially the image tracking) isn’t available for iOS. We could probably release it for Android pretty easily, though.

    • tony on December 2, 2010 at 7:36 pm

    What software libraries are you guys using to develop these AR apps on the Tegra? Also, what is the status of this on Android?

      • admin on December 2, 2010 at 9:23 pm
        Author

      We used a software library that was the precursor to the Qualcomm AR SDK (the free one for Android that is now in Beta).

      We haven’t tried to do a port to Android; unfortunately, we do not have the resources to do so. This was a game demo, and would require some work to complete as a real game. If someone wanted to invest in it, we could probably find folks to do the port, though. 🙂

    • tony on December 2, 2010 at 10:23 pm

    I was just curious because I am a grad student looking to do some profiling of AR apps on various embedded platforms, Tegra 2 and OMAP 4 in particular. I just wanted to get something up and running that is somewhat optimized for the hardware. I’ve been currently using OpenCV to do some simple AR stuff, but, this is terribly slow on the Tegra.

  4. Wow! what an thought ! What a concept ! Lovely .. Astounding …

  5. I guess I’ll have to upgrade my cell so I can get some of there cool apps…

    • EricH on June 22, 2011 at 6:42 pm

    Hey,

    Where can this game be obtained for a Xperia X10?
    I don’t see a link on this site.

    Thanks,

      • admin on June 22, 2011 at 7:24 pm
        Author

      It isn’t yet available anywhere; if someone wanted to give us some funding, we could port to Android! 🙂

    • Zackyjack on June 26, 2011 at 6:34 am

    I’d give you $30 for an Android version

    • Jeremy on July 13, 2011 at 4:36 pm

    @Blair

    I have a Xoom Tablet and would like to see this ported to Android. How much do you need to port it to Android? You can make your money back on the app market!

    • tweaq on August 26, 2011 at 4:36 pm

    I and several of my friends would LOVE to play this, we would like to help but we are not programming inclined. Though I have done a little with AR. You guys should start up a kickstarter.com page to raise the funding. It’s basically like a pre-sale so you can raise the funds.

    • Chico on September 12, 2011 at 10:17 pm

    So I guess it’s safe to assume this project is officially dead?

    Too bad, it looked like it was going to be cool.

      • admin on September 24, 2011 at 7:29 am
        Author

      Perhaps not “dead” but definitely in suspended animation. We have no funding to keep working on it (either at the University or privately) so it’s not going anywhere soon.

    • brauni on September 25, 2011 at 7:43 am

    It has the buzz, add it to kickstart. I know alot of ppl will spend some to get it to happen and get the game then!

    • Dante on February 7, 2012 at 5:36 pm

    Yes, please add this to KickStart, you have thousands in funding within 30 days!!

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