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It maps your house
By Dave Gonzales
A new augmented reality horror game called Night Terrors is trying to get funding on IndieGoGo. On its face, it appears to be a cool idea: once they raise enough money to continue development, the app will turn your boring real-life house into the haunted house setting of the in-game narrative.
Using the flashlight, camera, and display of your device (plus: it’s best to plug in your headphones), you can explore your own home. The story is vague, something about an 8 year old girl trapped in ghost-land, but a lot of survival horror games unfold from a vague premise, so that’s not an indicator of quality. The draw remains that you’re walking around your own house and the app will manipulate things in the environment and produce ghostly apparitions.
The augmented reality game industry has toyed with ghosts before. I remember playing Ghostbusters Paranormal Blast around Brooklyn, New York about two-and-a-half years ago. But where that game would just overlay 3D models onto your video camera and estimate where they were in 3D space using the gyroscope in your device, Night Terrors uses a more cinematic approach to haunting your house.
The development team is shooting practical ghost effects that will be composited into your house in real time. So you walk into your bathroom and see something in the darkness behind you. It also alters the sound of the game to match the reverb of different rooms, and places noises in surround sound. So you walk out of your bathroom and something is pounding on your door and shrieking. It sounds like it could be that perfect mix of fun and terrifying. Until you really think about it. Then it’s just terrifying.
The nice thing about live-compositing has over using 3D models (outside of aesthetics) is that it saves on processing power when the characters don’t have to be rendered. The interesting thing about Night Terrors is it uses some of that saved power to create a 3D map of your home.
To make the compositing seem real and to achieve the sound interactivity Night Terrors is shooting for, it’s using all the gizmos on your device to create a virtual floor plan of your house and populate it with the needed story elements.
Yeah, a ghost can chase you in a game and that’s cool, but you also just put a 3D floor plan of everything in your house into the app memory of your device that is connected to the internet. Have we learned nothing from Edward Snowden?
Of course, if you take a laissez-faire approach to potential hackers knowing where you put everything in your house — or are a fan of augmented reality entertainment — maybe you want to fund this campaign. The lowest award point buys you a copy of the app when it comes out, and you can even buy your way into the September beta test.
Someone should do it just to let the rest of us know if the end of the game is a screen that says: “Sucker! We have a map of your house.” That would be the scariest ending possible.
By Dave Gonzales
A new augmented reality horror game called Night Terrors is trying to get funding on IndieGoGo. On its face, it appears to be a cool idea: once they raise enough money to continue development, the app will turn your boring real-life house into the haunted house setting of the in-game narrative.
Using the flashlight, camera, and display of your device (plus: it’s best to plug in your headphones), you can explore your own home. The story is vague, something about an 8 year old girl trapped in ghost-land, but a lot of survival horror games unfold from a vague premise, so that’s not an indicator of quality. The draw remains that you’re walking around your own house and the app will manipulate things in the environment and produce ghostly apparitions.
The augmented reality game industry has toyed with ghosts before. I remember playing Ghostbusters Paranormal Blast around Brooklyn, New York about two-and-a-half years ago. But where that game would just overlay 3D models onto your video camera and estimate where they were in 3D space using the gyroscope in your device, Night Terrors uses a more cinematic approach to haunting your house.
The development team is shooting practical ghost effects that will be composited into your house in real time. So you walk into your bathroom and see something in the darkness behind you. It also alters the sound of the game to match the reverb of different rooms, and places noises in surround sound. So you walk out of your bathroom and something is pounding on your door and shrieking. It sounds like it could be that perfect mix of fun and terrifying. Until you really think about it. Then it’s just terrifying.
The nice thing about live-compositing has over using 3D models (outside of aesthetics) is that it saves on processing power when the characters don’t have to be rendered. The interesting thing about Night Terrors is it uses some of that saved power to create a 3D map of your home.
To make the compositing seem real and to achieve the sound interactivity Night Terrors is shooting for, it’s using all the gizmos on your device to create a virtual floor plan of your house and populate it with the needed story elements.
Yeah, a ghost can chase you in a game and that’s cool, but you also just put a 3D floor plan of everything in your house into the app memory of your device that is connected to the internet. Have we learned nothing from Edward Snowden?
Of course, if you take a laissez-faire approach to potential hackers knowing where you put everything in your house — or are a fan of augmented reality entertainment — maybe you want to fund this campaign. The lowest award point buys you a copy of the app when it comes out, and you can even buy your way into the September beta test.
Someone should do it just to let the rest of us know if the end of the game is a screen that says: “Sucker! We have a map of your house.” That would be the scariest ending possible.