Nintendo 3DS AR Games
Recently I picked up a Nintendo 3DS - I debated for a while but eventually decided that the game library looked pretty awesome and I was eager to try out some of the old handheld games on the virtual console, so I went for it. I debated between the 2DS and the 3DS XL, because I (accurately) predicted that I wouldn't care for the 3D, but I ended up going with the XL for the bigger screen and the fact that you can fold it into something that fits nicely in a jacket pocket. But this post isn't about the 3DS in general - this post is about a feature I didn't know about until I opened the box - AR games. They are AWESOME.
AR stands for augmented reality, and is a technology that I view as something of a stepping stone towards full blown virtual reality. The basic idea is that you see your everyday humdrum surroundings, and add something more. The 3DS achieves this via a set of AR cards (the 3DS comes with 6 of them, and I believe some games that use the functionality have more) that looks like this:
As far as I can tell, the cards themselves really aren't that important, and Nintendo could just as easily use a piece of paper with a red triangle on it as a picture of Mario. They serve as anchors so that the 3DS knows what it is looking at. When you start up the AR games section of the 3DS, it first tells you to use the question mark card and position it about 14 inches from the 3DS. It then measures the distance (the 3DS has two forward facing cameras allowing it to triangulate the distance) and starts augmenting your reality. For the first game, this involves targets appearing on, around, and even inside the surface you are playing on. The finale comes when a dragon pops out of a statue and you have to shoot it until it explodes, all while it is lunging at you leaving giant (simulated) scratch marks across your 3DS camera. It was an incredible experience and a completely unexpected one - I find it funny that my favorite 3DS feature so far is one that I didn't even know existed when I purchased it.
The games are all accessed using the question mark card, while the other 5 are used to get pictures (in 2D or 3D) with the Nintendo characters standing on them. This lets you get some awesome photos, and the coolest part is that the character that appears is proportional to the size of the card - so I can print out a giant Mario card, and come up with the following picture of Mario chilling out on my computer desk (for comparison, I've put a normal sized card of link next to him). The only thing I dislike so far is the low quality of the 3DS cameras - the photo below is the original taken with the 3DS camera, but I suspect the AR algorithms would take a lot more horsepower on high resolution images.
To wrap this post up, Nintendo 3DS Augmented Reality is an awesome new feature and I am looking forward to seeing how this develops with future consoles. If I can someday turn my living room into an interactive Mario platformer, I will be a happy man.