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For the gang at lm/nl, it represents even more.
We're a small group, obsessed with creating experiences that bridge the digital and physical worlds, and fundamentally impact the way we perceive and appreciate our environments. We tend to develop outsized concepts, the kind of thing the phrase 'pipe dream' was coined to describe. For better or worse, we often find ourselves following these pipe dreams to the ends of the Earth.
About two years ago, we had one of these ideas: to combine the world of butt-on-the-couch first-person shooter gaming with physical blasters and augmented reality, and produce an experience for the mass market. At this stage, we worked with our parent company to prototype and conceptualize a complete system facilitating connected toy/smartphone experiences. You can see the original prototype here:
We had every reason to believe that the experience itself would work, though you'd forgive me if I said getting this out to the mass market was far from a sure thing.
It took a bit of grinding and some false starts, but eventually and fortunately, we found receptive partners in Hasbro and Shoot the Moon, an innovative group that created and holds the rights to the original Lazer Tag IP, who had together been developing similar experiences.
And here we are. I'll follow up in a separate post to talk about our design philosophies and inspiration, but for now, it's just amazing to sit back and see Lazer Tag: AR out in the world, being talked about by the New York Times and named to Toys R Us' 2012 Hot Holiday List.
]]>The current hardware, form factors, etc. are cumbersome. Community emphasis generally leans too hard on visual enhancement. Utility is often limited.
And yet I keep coming back to AR. In this case, an unplanned hallway conversation about the history and sales footprint of the Band-Aid brand led to one of the most emotional experiences I've had the pleasure of bringing to life: Band-Aid Magic Vision.
Band-Aid is one of the most powerful brands in the world, but not always in the ways that you'd expect.
For more than 90 years, the ritual of applying a Band-Aid to a child's first boo boo (or second or third or...) has been a foundational bonding moment for parent and child. A moment of healing. Of safeguarding.
The brand also sells more than four billion bandages every year, which in context is staggering. That's more than the total number of smartphones, gaming consoles, cable boxes combined. (A bandage is a lot cheaper than hardware, yeah.)
By rethinking Band-Aid's future as not just thin plastic, but rather, as a media platform - and coupling that vision with that magic moment, I came back to employing technology I've come to, well, not despise, but to feel... meh about.
In this case, though, something felt different. AR made sense.
Sharing mobile technology is a common behavior amongst parents and their children. And the fact that you'd have two people already bonding over the application of a bandage means you could avoid the typical, clumsy, 'hold your device up while trying to be aware of your surroundings' use case. One could set up the experience for the other - and together they could share in it.
So we made Band-Aid Magic Vision. A baby step towards a brand's eventual migration to media platform. And a rekindler of faith in AR, for me, anyway.
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The impetus behind this game was a simple marketing challenge: convey the advantages of Bloomberg's enterprise-level Trading Solutions platform to an audience of investors and traders who are too busy (and often times too cynical) to care about enterprise-level software. To hook these alpha dogs, the game plays to their competitive spirit, presenting them with a series of ridiculously difficult mazes and puzzles - and inviting them to compare their performance against others within the financial community.
Trading Solutions comes into play via in-game power ups - based on the products' unique attributes - that let you "exploit" your way to the top of the leaderboards. Life's not always fair, I know.
I'm also proud to say that (I think) we've made the first Web registration flow that lets you play your way out of the site if your credentials aren't accepted. Give it a shot at http://www.bloomberglabyrinth.com.
* By "I," I mean I was its creative director. Which means I got to pretend I was doing everything while a team of incredibly talented programmers, producers, artists and designers (including the brain behind The World's Hardest Game) slaved over its execution.
]]>Yeah... not so much. Anyway, Qualcomm developed a series of videos tracking the ways people use wireless devices around the world and got in touch with me through my pals at JWT.
Also features the first public performance of Controller, proving that wireless technology has never made it easier to sell out!
]]>The Future of AR is Gaming: Vertigore CEO Josh Shabtai at InsideAR 2011 from Josh Shabtai on Vimeo.
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A few weeks back, toy maker Hasbro released an inexpensive piece of plastic called my3D, billed by many as an update on the classic Viewmaster: a stereoscopic viewer that connects to your iPhone or iPod Touch. The primary focus from media so far has been on the toy's promise of bringing 3D to iOS devices, which is understandable, given the name. But the real story is far more interesting.
my3D is the first virtual reality device that's truly accessible to the mass market.
It's a deeply immersive, spatially aware experience that combines 360-degree navigation across 3 axes with rich 3D sound and visuals... and it retails for under $35. It'll be available at more than 1,700 Target stores, which is no small development. It doesn't perfect the concept of virtual reality by any means, but it does open it up to mass audiences for the first time...
...which is a revolutionary feat more than four decades (or, by some accounts, almost 600 years) in the making.
I've been thinking about this for some time, having spent the last few months creating software for the platform. My company, Vertigore Games, developed two launch titles for my3D: a 360-degree shoot-em-up called Sector 17 and 3D panoramic virtual tour Teleport: LA.
And yes, I'm biased... but when I first got my hands on a my3D prototype, I knew I'd caught a glimpse at something significant: an inexpensive device with the potential to change a player's proximity and relationship to a game. Equally important, it suggests opportunities to create new, natural user interfaces and experiences that will be relevant in a post-smartphone/tablet world.
If you've ever (secretly or not) enjoyed the Lawnmower Man, grab one. It's lo-fi sci-fi.
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