When it comes to training infantry soldiers in the US military there are all sorts of drills and programs that the warriors go through. One of the coolest is the 3D virtual reality system from Quantum3D that may be the coolest and most realistic shooter in the world. The company has announced that it has updated the training system called ExpeditionDI with new hardware.
ExpeditionDI has been updated with a new high-resolution head mounted display. The display has a higher resolution of 1280 x 1024 allowing the solider to be more immersed in the program. Other cool features and upgrades for the system include a new head motion tracker that correlates to head motion in a more realistic manner to deliver a new view of the training environment when the head is turned.
The system also gets a new audio headset, a hot-swappable battery, a weapon subsystem, and is embedded computer that processes the graphics and simulation that can withstand field conditions. The vest the system uses is also load bearing, and the device has a posture tracker that can sense when the solider is standing, kneeling, or prone. It has wireless capability as well.
This game is called AR.Pursuit and it’ll make controlling your flying machine all the more fantastic with augmented reality – available at the end of November in the Apple App Store. It’s a two-player game where you control your AR.Drone VS a friend’s, blasting away at them with missiles and machine guns, playing cat and dog in a real world / virtual reality world simulation. It’s so weird! It’s so wild! It looks like so much fun!
If you’re unfamiliar with the AR.Drone experience, take a look at our Hands-on post and come on back after you’re done. Then take a look at this game. There are two roles: “pursuer” and “pursued.” The pursuer is equipped with both an automatic machine gun and missiles, the machine gun firing whenever the frontal camera detects the pursued AR.Drone, while the missiles are fired by shaking your iPhone/iPod touch/iPad. Once you hit your opponent, you switch roles, they now act as the pursuer and you the pursued.
Once your iDevice is connected to your AR.Drone, one player just has to select “create” and the color of their opponent’s color and type of hull. The second player selects “join,” the components of the first person’s flier, and the game is on! What you view through your iDevice is a view of your AD.Drone is seeing. Each game lasts between 1 and 9 minutes, roles are defined randomly at the beginning of the game, and the app will cost $2.99. Cheep! Check out the full press release below, and check out the fun preview video!
AR.Pursuit: The first game in Augmented Reality especially developed for the AR.Drone
SOUTHFIELD, Mich., Nov. 18, 2010 — Parrot, a global leader in wireless devices for mobile phones, announces the availability of AR.Pursuit, a game in augmented reality that takes advantage of the exceptional technical and flight capabilities of the Parrot AR.Drone.
Available end of November in the Apple App Store, AR.Pursuit enables players to measure and challenge their piloting skills.
The rules of the game
AR.Pursuit is a two-player pursuit game, where a player has to escape from the other one, as in the game of cat and mouse.
The “pursuer” has two kinds of virtual weapons to reach its opponent:
- Automatic machine gun: as soon as the frontal camera detects the pursued AR.Drone, bullets are automatically sent in order to slow it down. When it is hit, the AR.Drone will physically ‘react’ to the attack and the escape maneuvers will be more difficult for the pilot.
- Missiles: when the opponent is locked on the screen, the pilot of the pursuer AR.Drone has to shake his/her iPhone/iPod touch/iPad to send a missile.
When it is hit by a missile, the “pursued” becomes “pursuer” and so on. At half time, the roles are automatically reversed. The winner is the player who has the longest escape time during the entire game.
A technological first
Once the Bluetooth of the iDevice is on, each player connects to his/her AR.Drone in Wi-Fi and launches AR.Pursuit.
One of the players selects the “create” option on the main menu and indicates his/her opponent’s color and type of hull (indoor or outdoor).
The second player selects the “join” option in the main menu and also indicates the characteristics of his/her opponent. Then the game can start.
Each player can see on the screen of his/her iPhone/iPod touch/iPad what the AR.Drone is seeing. Each action, a shoot received or launched, will also be visualized on the screen via the magic of augmented reality.
Note: If the game is played with indoor hulls, players should place the colored stickers (sold with the AR.Drone) on it.
AR.Pursuit is an enthralling game that makes the most of the extreme maneuverability and stability of the AR.Drone, and which dives the players into a world where real and virtual are mingling… A first!
* Game time: 1 to 9 minutes (3 minutes by default)
* The roles of each player are arbitrarily defined at the beginning of the game.
* Game available around Nov. 26 in the App StoreSM
* Price: $2.99
Virtual Reality (VR) was all the rage several years ago. In arcades all over the world (where you could find them), there were rigs set up to showcase a digital world, where the player was fully submerged. A part of the game, and not just playing it. And while it may have quieted down over the years, it looks like Nissan and Namco Bandai have found a way to make it useful again. Both companies have announced today that they plan on creating a driving simulation that uses advanced VR technology, with a Smart Grid, to provide an in-depth driving experience second to none.
With the Smart Grid in place, Nissan and Namco Bandai have made it possible for the simulator to produce an ultra-high-definition 3D image, with pixels that are estimated to be about four times larger than the ones displayed by a standard full high-definition image. Four people can use the simulator at the same time, making the driving scenario that much more realistic. The system is able to formulate parts of the city, or the city in its entirety depending on the view, quickly, which includes the road, buildings, and other facilities. The whole while, the system is running diagnostics on the simulator, as well as the drivers.
The two companies have also included the next-generation Intelligent Transport System (ITS). This system is in place to connect, in real-time, people, vehicles, and the traffic infrastructure as a whole, to watch and study it. It can also be used to improve the overall road safety for cars and pedestrians alike. The whole point of the system is to test multiple vehicles on the road at one time, giving far more realistic results than previous methods. And the back-drop is a futuristic version of Yokohama City. Nissan designed the base specifications of the city, as well as the mobility aspects (obviously), while Namco Bandai did all of the system work. The impressive simulator, with all of its facets, will be showcased at this year’s CEATAC Japan expo, which takes place on October 5th through the 9th.
If you’ve been reading OhGizmo for the last 5 years, you might recognize VirtuSphere from this 2005 post. Since then, not too much is different, besides that VirtuSphere seems to be trying to open up to a new market that’s not the US Army or NASA: gamers.
VirtuSphere is at GDC hoping that someone will step up and port some worthwhile games to their system. Like, you know, Halo 3. Meantime, what they have in the works is a gameshow that (as far as I can tell) involves two people in two VirtuSpheres trying to virtually kill each other or something. If you want to try one of these out, you’ll be able to find it in the Excalibur in Las Vegas in about a month, or if you just can’t wait, expect to pony up about $55,000 for one of your own.
For those of you out there who’ve gotten tired of Wii-style gameplay, not to mention mice and keyboards, this new-fangled immersive multiplayer gaming system created by a team of game designers of the National University of Singapore will be bound to shock your world, virtual, real, or augmented.
Players wear head-mounted displays and use a motion-sensing wand, both tracked by a tracking system, to move, crouch, jump, aim, and perform a galore of maneuvers within a game, collecting virtual game items and fighting other players along the course. With continuous real-time feedback, a player’s avatar actually imitates a player’s every action and move.
What’s even more remarkable is the augmented reality aspect that’s integrated in the entire gaming system. It lets gamers play in any open environment, the head-mounted display actually retaining a built-in camera that captures real-world view data, where the custom game engine syncs the real-world data with the game environment, so players have the ability to move around in the real world while using a virtual gun or sword to fight other players.
