07 March 2008

Mirage Money Demo Video
Accelerometer and Camera Synergy

There are already few accelerometer based games like Accelinvinders, Ball Game or great Groove labyrinth for the Nokia 5500 Sport but I found this demo video interesting because it shows the synergy of the accelerometer based technology and camera sensor.

Something like the good old Mosquitos or Attack of the killer virus but this Mirage X technology is promising as it is not only based on the camera and uses the tilt sensor as well. In a matter of fact I just can’t believe that we are still waiting for the first 3rd edition game that uses camera, we desperately need Mosquito port for 3rd edition as soon as possible.

Mirage Money is a game based on the new S60 API developed by my PhD student Fadi Chehimi to provide 3-D motion control for navigating with 3-D virtual and augmented environments running on mobile phones which is called Mirage-X.

Mirage Money is the very simple game which allows you to ‘fly’ in the 3-D world collecting the floating silver and gold coins by colliding with them on the screen. There game has two playing modes: Real Mirage where coins are augmented on images captured by the phone camera, and Virtual Mirage where the coins are floating in a virtual, sky-bounded environment. As these concepts are best explained with a video we have created the one below.

This game further illustrates the power of accelerometers and in particular the advantage of this interface is that it not only minimizes the use of buttons on the phone it also allows a more intuitive interface experience and allows the user to maintain the optimum viewing angle to the screen.

They are also currently investigating two further game extensions that will expand the possibilities of using the API, the first will allow two players to battle through space over a Bluetooth connection and second will utilize the N95’s GPS to create a novel augmented reality location based game.