Another Handheld AR game

Two projects currently underway at the Handheld Augmented Reality Project.

Mr. Virtuoso Teaches Art History with Augmented Reality (2005)

Virtuoso is a collaborative educational game designed to showcase the possibilities of the Handheld Augmented Reality (AR) framework. The game’s objective is to sort a collection of artworks according to their date of creation along a timeline drawn on a wall-mounted billboard (left = earlier, right = later). Every mark (fiducial) on the timeline carries one of the artworks, which are only visible through the player’s AR PDA. Initially the artworks are in random order. The player can pick up any artwork with his PDA, by clicking on the artwork on the display and drop it on a free position by clicking on the free fiducial on the display. Since all positions are initially occupied, the game requires two or more players to cooperate in swapping or rearranging the sequence of artworks.

and

The Invisible Train

The Invisible Train is the first real multi-user Augmented Reality application for handheld devices (PDAs). Unlike other projects, in which wearable devices were merely used as thin-clients, while powerful (PC-based) servers performed a majority of the computations (such as graphics rendering), our software runs independently on off-the-shelf PDAs - eliminating the need for an expensive infractructure.

The Invisible Train is a mobile, collaborative multi-user Augmented Reality (AR) game, in which players control virtual trains on a real wooden miniature railroad track. These virtual trains are only visible to players through their PDA's video see-through display as they don't exist in the physical world. This type of user interface is commonly called the "magic lens metaphor".

While these are Augmented Reality games, they are not Place Based games inthe same way that the ones we are looking at are.