HoloArcade
Project Team
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Supervision |
Introduction
The Microsoft HoloLens is a head mounted display (HMD) which allows the user to experience augmented reality. Instead of replacing your environment, the HoloLens allows you to extend it by creating and placing holograms. In contrast to other HMD's the computation is done on-board, which removes the movement restrictions many other HMD's have. The positional movement in space is tracked by an inside-out tracking system consisting of multiple depth cameras. This, combined with gestures and speech recognition, gave us the tools to create HoloArcade, which lets the user re-experience some of the most popular minigames in augmented reality.
Goal/Motivation:
In the end our goal was to use the core technologies the HoloLens offers and to test how they perform in different game settings. In addition to that we also wanted to design an experience, which could be used to demo the HoloLens to new users. Furthermore, we were interested to see how old popular games could be reinvented for augmented reality.
Functionality
As mentioned above HoloArcade is basically a collection of 7 minigames. In all of the 7 games the player has to take usage of the different gestures the HoloLens offers. While you're able to play action based games like dart or shooting balloons, HoloArcade additionally offers several 3D-puzzles. Games like The Cube and Snake3D were designated to encourage the player to move around, while other games like Pong are played stationary, which ensures the playability of the game. For now, the positioning of the minigames can be controlled with the menu, however ideally the arcade would use the generated mesh of the room to calculate the most optimal position for the minigames. Furthermore, the HoloArcade has a low poly map of the Informatikum built in, which can be accessed in the main menu. The map offers information about buildings by tapping on them and can be rotated and moved in space. It was originally planned to be used as a navigation tool to play our arcade games through beacon activation at different buildings over the campus.
For the design, we followed Googles' Material Design guidelines using mainly vibrant shades of red contrasted by neutral white. Of course our logo and screens follow empirically proven criteria for an appealing look using techniques such as the golden ratio, amongst others.
Our finished app runs passively in the background and sends us a notification, when a matched person has been found. If both parties confirm a handshake, a scanning process starts that, like a radar, helps the users find each other. Afterwards the actual dating process is in the hands of the users.
Outlook
The most important addition would be tutorials for completely new HoloLens users, who aren’t familiar with the different gestures. The most interesting addition would be a multiplayer mode, which allows two HoloLens users in the same room to play minigames against each other. The ability to synchronize playspaces would further set multiplayer AR Games apart from multiplayer VR Games by allowing a more socially direct interaction between the players.