Worktime Fun with Augmented Reality

There's nothing better than having a fun office environment. It's something we at The Go Game pride ourselves on, with a company motto like 'Play Like It's Your Job'. We played monthly tester games in our SF office, had random fancy dress moments in the costume closet, built forts out of packing boxes in the living room, and set up multiple projector screens for occasions from Movie Game showings to presidential inaugurations to NCAA championships.

Of course, it's always best when the fun in the office has an actual work-related purpose and isn't just running around putting Mentos candy in Coke bottles to watch the resulting explosions (at the office?! Us?! Never!). Today, Chris and I have been keeping ourselves highly entertained whilst playing around with these really cool augmented reality pictures from Nokia and GE. We sometimes get asked by people if our games are augmented reality and it's an area we're keen to explore a bit more. So when I noticed tweets from some of our friends at 1000heads and WOMWorld Nokia sending out pictures of themselves with one of the new Nokia devices, I thought it would be fun to test out. I didn't really get how it worked, but clicked the link and decided to try taking an augmented reality photo here in the office. The basic idea is that you print out an icon and hold it up to your webcam in the 3D experience page of the Nokia website.

Looking into the screen, you see yourself holding up a bit of paper. Not exciting. Sad monkey-dejected panda face.


Then all of a sudden...the paper's a 3D phone! Wowza!

Fold it and it's back to paper! Phone! Paper! Phone! We were like preschool children with a shiny new toy. The giggles and excitement level might even have approached that of the alleged Mentos-Coke explosion incident. We took photos with our office Super Mario wall both as regular paper:

And with Mario jumping up for a brand new mobile phone. That's a 1UP for sure.

Excited by all the possibilities for games and interactivity, we did some more poking around on the interwebs. Chris found this augmented reality digital hologram from GE, which starts off looking like a boring piece of paper...
But hold that paper in front of the webcam on the GE page and see what happens:

Ummmm DOPE. HELLA San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge with wind turbines kinda dope. We tested another one that even had little birds flying around the screen. Definitely gets the brain working on all sorts of cool ideas for integrating augmented reality into our games and events. We're going to do some tinkering here at the office and see what we can come up with. Stay tuned to this space and we'll come back at you when we've got some stuff to show. That is, if we manage to tear ourselves away from the exploding soda bottles in the backyard...