More and more uses of Augmented Reality have been rearing their head as mainstream products recently, thanks to the increase in smart phones. An iPhone (3GS only) app released on the app store yesterday provides an augmented overlay when driving along a road, detecting lanes and nearby vehicles. I wouldn’t say its exactly very useful, hell if you try using this while driving yourself you’ll probably end up dead, but its still a cool example of whats possible with low-cost technology and the app itself only costs a mere £1.79.

It wouldn’t be difficult to turn this into some sort of game (for passengers of course) – maybe some sort of Pokemon collector type game where you have to photograph a certain number of cars of a certain model or colour, or if you want to get controversial, virtually shooting at passing cars and scoring points for it.

I was going to mention some form of Death Race mechanics, but thats probably pushing it…

App: Augmented Driving by Imaginyze

Engadget have posted a video from a Microsoft event in Tel Aviv yesterday which showcased some of the technology which will be present in the upcoming Project Natal. The video below shows how Natal recognises full body movement, of not just one but two people in real-time.  This definitely has potential for some cool competitive and co-op mini-games, for example a Wild West dual or some beach volleyball (off the top of my head). As well as that, Natal uses face recognition to determine the gender of the player and represents them with a male or female avatar accordingly. Pretty cool right?

But what of butch ladies and girly gentlemen? I can see some offended players in the future. In relation to that, I found some of the comments on the Engadget post hilarious, notably “How’s Lady Gaga supposed to get her game on?” to which someone replied “Natal obviously can’t see her Poker Face silly”.  Genius.

Hit the jump for the video.

Read rest of story…

We’ve made front page news!

Well, sort of.

Today there’s a story on the front page of the University of Ulster’s website about my PhD and the work our team are doing investigating the potential benefits of using computer and video games for stroke rehabilitation. You can check the article out here by clicking the image below.

Update 8th April 2010: The press release was picked up by the Belfast Telegraph who wrote this article on the work.

Update 12th April 2010: We were also mentioned in the Irish Times, the Irish Independent and apparently the Daily Mirror as well.