How can you bring history to life? Forget the frayed communal headphones and audio guides at museums. With Google Glass, the wearable computer that is due for release next year, we will one day be able to go somewhere and read about local history while we stare at its real-life contours. But for some video-game developers, merely annotating the world isnāt enough. They hope to give us the power to change history with our eyes.
āImagine visiting the site of the battle of Waterloo,ā says Guillaume Campion, head of production at AMA, a French studio that is one of the first to be developing video games for Glass. āYou begin by reading about what happened during the battle through the glasses. But then you have the opportunity to play a game set within that context. Maybe you can even try to change the outcome of the battle in some way.ā
Video games, once confined to computers and dedicated consoles, have broken into the wild in recent years. As the size of smartphones has shrunk and their power increased, so developers have sought to take video games to new contexts. Google Glass offers the next logical platform in this trend. Since February this year, when the first developers were given the hardware, a number of game projects have emerged including Swarm, an augmented reality game that casts players as ants that must complete tasks, and , a Google Glass-based take on Battleships.
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Sixth sense
AMA, which revealed a as a proof-of-concept title at the Game Developerās Conference in Germany in August, is one of the major studios leading the Google Glass charge. Escape may be a far cry from Campionās colourful vision of an interactive battle of Waterloo: in the game you guide a stick character around a path of dots. But the studio has been investigating ways to create games that are mapped to the real world in some way.
āGoogle Glass is like a sixth sense: when you wear it youāre always connected, so you can keep an eye on the real environment while using applications without your hands,ā says Campion.
Despite the potential, there are significant challenges to playing games on the device, according to Det Ansinn, founder of BrickSimple, the company behind GlassBattle. āUser input is a huge challenge,ā he says. āThe only direct physical input is a touchpad on the side of the device. Beyond that, you have an accelerometer, gyroscope and compass. Thereās a pupil detector that offers very limited utility.
āWhen you design a game for Glass, youāre limited to voice, an awkward touchpad, and those sensors. Iām certain that developers will find interesting ways to use those inputs, but itās not conducive to traditional gaming input.ā
Rethinking gameplay
As such, developers canāt directly port a smartphone game to Google Glass; they have to rethink the entire user experience. āThis device is not meant to be the next console, but does present a new way of playing.ā Ansinn says. āNow the challenge is to create new genres, new types of gameplay.ā
AMA isnāt the only team to have envisioned a world in which video games can be seamlessly layered on top of what we see around us. One YouTube user recently of how Google Glass could be used to deliver a Call of Duty-style first-person shooter, a true multiplayer game, set in a disused quarry.
Itās a compelling vision of the future. But Campion remains unconvinced that this is the best direction for Google Glass games. āI donāt think this kind of experience will offer the killer game app for Glass,ā he says. Ansinn agrees, saying the current Google Glass hardware is a limiting factor.
āGlass is not a full augmented reality experience,ā Ansinn says. āThe display occupies a small upper corner portion outside of your normal field of view. While Glass has ignited the imagination for full augmented reality experiences, when you wear the device, you quickly realise that it canāt deliver on some of those imagined experiences.ā
Ansinn believes that future versions of Glass will soon augment the wearerās entire field of view. āI have no doubt that is coming ā this first iteration is a baby step to that dream,ā he says. āBut for hardcore gamers, it has a long way to go. Thereās much to be said for traditional controller input.ā
Even so, he remains optimistic that Glass could provide a serious platform for both developers and players in the future. āCombine display advancements with the leaps being made in mobile CPUs and GPUs, and full world-enveloping gaming experience will be here within five years. These are early days.ā
