Games with Reality - iPhone Game Blueprints - page 324

One of the most ambitious initiatives is an intriguing game project called Tabletop
Speed by Dekko ( http://www.dekko.co/tabletop-racing-out-now-for-ios/ ) . This is a
Markerless AR application that tries to develop a 3D landscape of the nearby sur-
roundings using the regular camera included in iOS devices. The standard back-
ground for the game is a tabletop that has been made messy with some dispersed
magazines, pencils, small boxes, and so on. The application analyzes these objects
(apparently some parallax calculations are used) and tries to recreate their 3D geo-
metry in a virtual form. The resulting landscape is used as the track for a race. This
sounds very exciting, but the process of 3D map generation may require some pa-
tience and attentiveness from the player.
A screenshot from Tabletop Speed by Dekko. The grid system is shown
AR Earth Invasion by Hoi Yan Mak , SKY SIEGE 3D by Simbiotics , and some other
titles are examples of the AR fixed shooter, a very popular and viable subgenre. The
concept is simple, players get some weapons (the characters are gun-turret oper-
ators, fighter pilots, drone operators, and so on), and they need to find and destroy
various flying enemies by moving a smartphone or tablet around. Such games do
not need any special fiducial markers. They may find some minor reference points
around and utilize the advantages of the internal gyroscope. Of course, the space
orientation method can be inaccurate, but because of the dynamic nature of such
games and because virtual objects on the screen are considered as flying in space
and not staying on any fixed surface, this is less evident and can be overlooked by
players.