I’m a huge fan of games: board, card, sports, computer, console or even just seeing who can throw a wad of paper into a trashcan.  The promise of adding augmented reality to these games is one of the reasons I’m excited about the technology. 

The team at the AEL research lab at Georgia Tech brings us a video of an AR table top game called Art of Defense.

The main worry I’ve had about using hand-held units like smart-phones to play table top AR games is the arm fatigue and the limited viewing area.  At least the limited viewing area concern has been reduced, but I’m still unsure of the arm fatigue.  The game itself looks interesting (I’m a fan of Tower Defense games) and I think they’ve done a good job of applying AR. 

Their stated goal is:

The goal of this research is to explore the affordances and constraints of handheld AR interfaces for collaborative social games, and to create a game that leverages them as fully as possible. The results from the user study show that the game is fun to play, and that by tightly registering the virtual content with the tangible game pieces, tabletop AR games enable a kind of social play experience unlike non-AR computer games. We hope this research will inspire the creation of other handheld augmented reality games in the future, both on and off the tabletop.

Based on the video I think they’ve done an exempliary job.

Popularity: 11% [?]