AR Mobile Games
Euclidean Skies
Euclidean Skies is the sequel to and the AR mobile game Euclidean Land. It’s a great game for anyone who enjoys playing puzzle games in their down time. You play a hero and can move around the map by tapping on the next space. You start at one door in the world and the exit door will open when you complete the goal, usually killing the enemies. What makes the game interesting it that you can manipulate the world on different axes. You can rotate the blocks in the world right, left, up, and down, allowing the player to completely change the world as well as kill enemies this way. Where this game really shines is it’s AR capabilities. The game allows you to choose to uses your phone’s camera and AR capabilities to give you 6DOF view of the world. It’s a simple mode that can be toggled on and off at anytime and it only takes a few seconds for the phone to sense a surface and place the world. You can also replace the world at anytime. The only issue I had was with some of the gestures. The gesture for re-scaling the world could be easier to use. It was just pinching but it’s swiping up or down from the bottom of the screen, which my iPhone confuses with me trying to get to the control center. Despite this the world does auto generate at a decent scale so it’s not obnoxious at all. I also wish they added a rotate gesture for when in the AR mode. They take it out assuming you will walk around, but it would be nice to have it for when I’m lazy.
Overall Euclidean Skies is an interesting new way to play a phone game for me. I really enjoy puzzle type games and this one was really interesting already with numerous way to solve it. Although this app works just as well without the AR element, I think it’s much more interesting and helpful to have the game take actual space. I can see, interact, and understand what’s happening in the puzzle when I can walk around it and get a different angle. You also can see the optional goal much more clearly as it’s displayed near the world.
ARCore and SLAM
Like many mobile AR games, Euclidean Skies’ AR capabilities come from ARCore, which uses SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) to motion track the phone’s position relative to reality, detecting the size and location of surfaces around, and estimating the environments lighting conditions. It does this by detecting feature points and tracking these points along with inertial measurements from the device’s IMU. Clusters of feature points are used to detect flat surfaces. All of these things come together to place the game world in your home.
