Institute For The Future

A-Rage wearable gaming platform

A colleague pointed me to this site out of Australia for a project called the A-Rage, a new, still-in-beta wearable hardware & software platform for building augmented-reality games (ARG). These games overlay some type of fictional content onto existing spaces or infrastructures.

I use broad language because this term applies to a number of different styles: a game that uses fake web pages and posts them on the real Internet would be an ARG, as well as something like the A-Rage that superimposes game graphics onto the wearer's field of vision. One of their demo games is an augmented-reality version of Quake, the famous shoot-em-up game. As in the standard PC version of the game, virtual monsters rush towards the player who must destroy them fast and furiously. In the A-Rage implementation, the wearer sees these monsters coming towards as if they were pedestrians in his environment; when he turns his head or walks forward, a new view of the "game board" is displayed. Shooting is done with a separate, gun-shaped device.

 

As an early attempt in a new genre, the A-Rage is an impressive system, but as-is I'm not convinced. Even looking past the current generation of clunky hardware, as far as I can tell the demonstration games built for the A-Rage don't seem to use the features of the environment as an aspect of game play. The game engine doesn't recognize and account for a building that may be 100 yards in front of you, or a row of trees or people passing by. This is less augmented-reality gaming and more like relocating the standard video game experience from the living room to the outdoors (granted with some innovations in immersion and gestural input). The really new idea that augmented-reality gaming brings to the table is the notion that pieces of the real world can have dual identities as components of a fictional game, maybe even as completely different elements of multiple ARGs simultaneously. Only those in-the-know really understand why that stop sign or boulder is important. The best ARGs also seamlessly weave together elements from the game and the real world--one minute you're a character searching the street for clues, the next minute you're simply taking a stroll--while the demo games for the A-Rage system seem so visually demanding and completely unrelated to standard reality as to give the player no chance to simultaneously interact with the environment (though there may be a contrary view to be found in the experience of Prof. Thad Starner, friend of IFTF and constant wearer of a heads-up display for the past several years). Again, the A-Rage is very much a version 1.0 and we'll watch systems like these to see how they evolve.