Niantic, the makers of Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, today announced what they’re calling a “multifaceted partnership” with Punchdrunk, the company behind the ‘Sleep No More’ immersive theatrical experience.
“Together we are developing multiple projects that will reinvent storytelling for a 21st century audience and further expand the horizon of interactive entertainment,” Niantic says in a blog post.
Punchdrunk are pioneers of the immersive theater genre. The UK-based theater company focuses heavily on bringing audiences a narrative experience with a unique ability to freely choose what to watch and where to go. This is achieved by adapting classic texts, physical performances, and immersive set design. How Niantic will bring AR into this isn’t certain, although it sounds exciting.
“I believe that Punchdrunk and Niantic can create something that has never been done before. They do it in AR, we do it in real life. Collide the two and I think we will blow people’s minds; bend the rules of genre and redefine the norms of mobile gaming,” says Felix Barrett, Artistic Director of Punchdrunk.
The company says it’s been experimenting with “new forms of gaming on mobile and AR glasses,” with 10 new games currently in development including prototypes for AR glasses. Niantic says each of these games, like their previous titles, will be centered around outdoor exploration, movement, and social interaction.
Wallace & Gromit are popular British claymation characters featured in award-winning stop motion animated films and TV shows. This week, Aardman Animations, W&G Ltd., and Fictioneers Ltd. announced that they’ll be bringing the series to AR for the first time with The Big Fix Up this fall.
According to a prepared statement, Wallace & Gromit: The Big Fix Up will be a “first of its kind, story-driven” AR experience. Based on the announcement trailer, embedded above, it looks like they will be using CG animation for the characters, but will do so in a way that mimics stop motion movement. The AR experience is being developed in Unity and is a collaborative project with research support from the University of South Wales and funding from UK Research & Innovation.
“Aardman is a multi-faceted creative studio and is just as happy with classic film making as it is with new and emerging technologies,” says Merlin Crossingham, Aardman’s Creative Director of Wallace & Gromit. “Wallace and Gromit’s heart and soul is in stop motion, but they have often dabbled in the cutting-edge of tech, and this is one of those occasions. We are delighted to join forces with the amazing folk at Fictioneers to take Wallace and Gromit on a new adventure in such a groundbreaking way.”
We don’t really know much else about The Big Fix Up other than you’re basically guaranteed to walk away smiling after trying it if the series’ track record is anything to go by. To get notified when more details are available, check out The Big Fix Up’s website to register your interest.
Pokemon Go is getting a major new feature; AR occlusion. Or it is on some Android devices, anyway.
Niantic announced today that select Android devices will be able to participate in a beta test that introduces a ‘Reality Blending’ feature while using AR in Pokémon Go. The beta will begin in June and is essentially a form of occlusion for Pokémon Go that will allow the game’s sprites to be blocked or hide behind real-world objects.
The ‘reality blending’ beta will be available from June for select players with a Samsung Galaxy S9, Samsung Galaxy S10 and Google Pixel 3 or Pixel 4. Niantic says that the feature will only be available to a limited number of players on those devices first, and that support for more devices will be added in the near future. Check the occlusion out in action in the GIF below.
According to Niantic, with the reality blending feature, “Pokémon will be able to hide behind a real object or be occluded by a tree or table blocking its path, just like a Pokémon would appear in the physical world.”
Pokemon Go occlusion is something fans have been asking for for some time. It should stand to make that game that big more immersive. In fact, Niantic itself first teased the feature two years ago now.
However, this isn’t the only update that game will receive — users will soon be able to take part in an opt-in feature called PokéStop Scanning, which brings the Portal Scanning feature from Niantic’s other title, Ingress, to Pokémon Go. This will mean Level 40 Trainers will be able to contribute 3D maps of PokéStops and Gyms by walking around and uploading images of those places with their phones.
Besides generating dynamic 3D maps of points of interest in the game, this new feature will also allow future improvements where Niantic can “tie virtual objects to real world locations and provide Pokémon with spatial and contextual awareness of their surroundings. For instance, this awareness will help Snorlax find that perfect patch of grass to nap on or give Clefairy a tree to hide behind.”
All these new Pokémon Go features will be available in a limited capacity to select players starting from June.
Resolution Games, the studio behind Acron: Attack of the Squirrels (2019) and Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs (2019), today launched their latest game on Magic Leap 1. Called Glimt: The Vanishing at the Grand Starlight Hotel, the detective game arrives today on Magic Leap World for free.
Glimt is Resolution Games third AR game and was created as part of Magic Leap’s Independent Creator Program.
Resolution calls it “a captivating detective game filled with mystery, psychic powers, magic and, of course, intrigue.”
Talking to Magic Leap, Resolution Games producer Johan Donwill describes it as a “whodunit-detective game that has the player using a combination of their sleuthing skills, psychic abilities and visualization tools to discover the catalyst behind sudden disappearances at the Grand Starlight Hotel.”
If you own a Magic Leap 1, you can download it now for free on Magic Leap World. Check out the trailer below:
Magic Leap and Insomniac Games announced a new game, Strangelets, for the Magic Leap One. The game is a follow-up to Insomniac’s previous AR title Seedling, which released last year.
We tried an early version of Insomniac’s previous AR game, Seedling, at Leap Con in October last year. The full version of the game released later that year in December, and according to Insomniac the new AR game Strangelets follows on from Seedling’s story and sees players continue to deal with “the effects of ‘The Schmelling Incident'” from the story of the first game.
The Magic Leap blog also provides a brief description of the gameplay that Magic Leap owners can expect from Strangelets. “With the help of a mysterious companion known only as “Bulby,” Strangelets invites players to search their homes for dimensional rifts, reach inside to rescue strange alien creatures, then care for their collection by using harvested energy from real-world objects.”
The game also supposedly takes real-world time and weather into account to vary the gameplay, and features a story “worthy of retelling.”
Sony recently acquired Insomniac Games and, as such, the announcement for the game suggests Strangelets will be the their last release as an independent studio. Before Stangelets, their most recent release was Stormland, an Oculus-exclusive VR title, which was announced before the acquisition but released after it. Stormland’s release was unaffected by the acquisition, but the studio’s future in AR and VR remains unclear.
The game takes classic Minecraft mechanics and merges them with map-based, AR gameplay similar to games like Pokemon Go. You can collect materials while walking around your neighborhood and then use them to build AR Minecraft structures with your phone’s camera.
We also posted our full impressions piece of the game earlier today as well. Here’s a brief snippet of what we thought:
“Minecraft Earth feels very well intertwined with the ideas in the original Minecraft game. It takes advantage of existing, well-known Minecraft mechanics in a new way that feels like your world is transforming around you. Unlike Wizards Unite, there is true magic at work here.”
That being said, the game also isn’t without its faults. You can read more here.
We also posted a preview video showing the core gameplay, including the AR elements, and some of the game’s main features. You can check that out above or over on our YouTube channel.
Will you be jumping into Minecraft Earth, now that it’s available in the US? Or have you already given it a spin? Let us know in the comments below.
I’ve been a huge Minecraft fan since almost the beginning – I played the alpha that was embedded on the Minecraft site and then the downloadable beta version after that. I remember when the game finally “released” and hit patch 1.0. While I stopped playing regularly many years ago, I still consider myself a big fan.
So when Mojang announced Minecraft Earth, a map-based mobile AR game, I felt mixture of skepticism and curiosity. I’ve been spurned by similar AR games before, but was curious to see how Minecraft Earth might differentiate itself in the market. As more and more information came out about the game, including features like the “adventure” events, I started to feel that maybe there was enough to separate it from the competition and offer an experience built to Minecraft’s strengths.
“Tappables” appear around the map and grant you with materials to use on buildplates.
As I noted in my Wizards Unite hands-on, these mobile map-based AR games work best when the activities and actions of the game directly relate to the franchise itself. That’s why I consider Pokemon Go to be a much more successful game, from a conceptual standpoint, than Wizards Unite – the act of walking around and catching Pokemon ties in perfectly with the franchise, whereas catching creatures from the Harry Potter universe doesn’t feel like it’s leveraging that property to its true potential.
The good news is that Minecraft Earth feels very well intertwined with the ideas in the original Minecraft game. It takes advantage of existing, well-known Minecraft mechanics in a new way that feels like your world is transforming around you. Unlike Wizards Unite, there is true magic at work here.
Mining And Walking In Minecraft Earth
It was a 95° F day in Melbourne when I first booted up the game. I had my account logged in, my headphones ready and a battery pack on hand, but I’d by lying if I said I was excited to go walking around in the heat for a few hours. However, after 5 minutes with the game, that completely changed. I got stuck in a gameplay loop that made me forget where I was and what streets I was walking down, completely ignorant of the heat until I was well past dehydrated and needed to stop for a break.
The game places your avatar on a map that tracks your position akin to Pokemon Go. From the get go, you can see Minecraft animals and little structures of blocks (which the developers call “tappables”) spread around your map. In the distance, you might see a large shaft of light, marking one of the “adventure” events available to play by yourself or with friends. When you’re in range of a tappable, you can tap on it a few times (which simulates the visual effect of mining in Minecraft) and the game will grant you with a few materials, varying in rarity.
Fighting spiders in one of the AR “adventure” events
Exploration rewards you with a stacked inventory full of materials, gathered from tappables and adventure events, that are taken straight from the original Minecraft game – dirt, cobblestone, sand etc. Even the beautifully familiar Minecraft soundtrack plays softly as you walk around, which weirdly helps create a connection between the world of Minecraft and the neighborhood you’re exploring.
I got completely immersed in the game for the first couple of hours – I had no idea what I would need materials for, or how I could use them, but I just kept going and collecting more. At home the next day, I realized that anything you collect in the world can then be used to build Minecraft structures and environments on ready-made “buildplates” in the game.
Buildplates
Smaller scale versions of buildplates can be edited in AR before exploring a full-scale version.
The only currently available buildplates in Minecraft Earth are sized as 8×8 blocks or 16×16 blocks and they are somewhat similar to LEGO buildplates. The only way to edit those buildplates is via AR on your phone’s camera. You can place a small version of a buildplates on a table and start adding to it with the materials you gathered from your trip outside. Then, you can save that draft and load it as a full-scale, 1:1 version (with 1 Minecraft block equaling 1 meter wide). You, and any friends playing with you, can then use the AR display on your phone to walk through a full-scale version of the environment you built a few minutes ago.
It’s an incredibly cool concept that many younger Minecraft fans will probably love. I found the feature cool but struggled to see myself regularly using it. After playing around with the AR structures, I went searching for more things to do in the game. It turns out that everything in Minecraft Earth leads you back to collecting materials to use on buildplates. The adventure events were amusing, and I can see kids enjoying them, but the two I completed only granted a few (slightly rarer than usual) materials. You can smelt and craft things too but, unlike Minecraft, these complete over time in the background per item, with more complex items or materials taking longer to complete. Anything you either craft or smelt makes something new to use on buildplates. In some cases, you might craft a sword to take into an adventure event, but then the adventure only rewards you with more materials for buildplates.
Your Minecraft “buildplates” can be placed down and explored in AR in full, 1:1 scale
This is where I started to grow frustrated with the game. There just isn’t much to do that isn’t grinding for materials for buildplates. It doesn’t help that the buildplates you start out with are quite limited. You unlock more as you level up, or you can purchase some fancier ones with the in-game currency, rubies. You can acquire rubies as you collect materials and explore, but you will realistically need to purchase some via an in-app purchase if you want to get the fancy buildplates anytime soon.
Granted, this whole loop of collect-and-build-and-repeat might be perfectly okay for a younger audience. They might want to collect as many materials as possible for days on end and rush home to put their new items on a buildplate. But for me, I quickly lost any inclination to interact with the buildplates after trying them, which made the rest of the game feel a little bit pointless.
Early Days For Minecraft Earth
There’s also no way to permanently place buildplates in a location on the map, for others to then explore in their own game even when you’re not playing. Others can join a buildplate session while you’re playing, but every buildplate you put down is temporary.It only exists for you and anyone you invite for as long as you’re interacting with it. If you could place buildplates down on real world locations permanently, it would be a game changer and make the world feel much more connected. Being able to permanently place things for others to then explore, and being able to explore others’ structures that you stumble upon in the world, would make everything feel like it’s building toward something.
Still, everything currently on offer might be enough to keep Minecraft’s audience coming back for more. It certainly feels immersive and amazing to walk around the world, collect materials and use them in AR building. You get that same feeling of wonder and excitement you get in the original Minecraft game. As I said, it’s still early days and the game is still in early access.
Maybe over time the development team will mine further down, make some changes and find a diamond. But for now, cobblestone works okay.
Minecraft Earth is launching gradually across regions, but is available now in early access most major countries, including the United States, the UK, Australia and more.
This article and all recorded footage is based on time spent with Minecraft Earth using a Google Pixel 3XL running Android 10.
Pokemon Go developer Niantic is set to share the platform it built its groundbreaking game on with others. In fact, it already has.
Recently the company hosted the Niantic Beyond Reality Content. The developer invited 10 indie studios to build new AR experiences using the same tools it created for Pokemon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. $300,000 in prize money was up for grabs.
First place went to Run to My Heart from JC Soft. It’s a mix of fitness app and game in which players run out to save their friends who have turned into potatoes. The app will teach you to pace your running as you scout for potions and eventually battle giant mutant hamsters. As you run, you discover more of the virus that’s putting the world at risk. Check out a video of the eccentric project below.
But there were plenty of other intriguing projects on show. CryptOS, for example, is an AR-hacking game that has you solving cybersecurity problems in the real world.
Wild Sanctuary, meanwhile, aims to bring the wonder of wildlife to your nearest street. You need to gather resources to save endangered species.
Off the back of the content, Niantic is planning to launch a Creator Program. This will aim to further aid the AR development community. Part of its offerings is the Niantic Beyond Reality Fund, which will specifically target new and innovative AR prototypes and experiences. Participants will also get access to Niantic’s AR development kit.
Finally, Niantic also confirmed it’s opening up sponsored location opportunities to small and medium businesses. The idea being you could, say, host a sponsored Pokemon Go space on the day you opened up a new store.
Death, taxes and Minecraft Earth launch countries – that’s what it feels like lately, with new launch countries for the mobile AR game popping up every few days. This time, it’s the United Kingdom’s turn to get building.
Tea, crumpets – and now also Minecraft Earth! Early access has arrived in the United Kingdom. Jolly good!
People living in the UK can now download the game, which is in early access and launching gradually worldwide, a few countries at a time. The United Kingdom joins New Zealand, Iceland, Australia, Mexico, Sweden, Canada, South Korea and the Philippines as launch countries. There is still no word on a United States launch, but given that the UK is one of the bigger markets that the game has launched in, a US launch might be coming soon.
The mobile AR game is Minecraft’s response to Pokemon Go and other map-based mobile games that get you out of the house and exploring the real world, intertwined with AR elements. You can build structures, craft weapons, collect materials by exploring your real-world neighborhood and fight monsters in AR during the “adventure” events scattered across the map.
While the game does share similarities to other map-based AR games, it also has its own nice Minecraft-spin to it that offers some nice points of difference. I’ve been able to try the game out here in Australia already, so you can expect a first impressions piece on the game soon.
What are your thoughts on Minecraft Earth? Have you tried the game out, and are you still waiting for it to launch in your country? Let us know in the comments below.
The Minecraft Earth release schedule seems to be speeding up a bit – just a few days after the last batch of countries, the new AR mobile game is now available in Canada, South Korea and the Philippines.
Queued up and ready to go! Today, three additional countries join the Minecraft Earth early access. Say hi to:
The game, while still in early access, is now available publicly to anyone in Australia, Mexico, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, South Korea, the Philippines and Iceland. The release schedule is gradual, rolling out a few countries at a time. With Canada, Australia and South Korea now on the map, it looks like we’re getting closer to a release in some of the bigger markets like the US and the UK.
Minecraft Earth is Microsoft’s response to the mobile AR craze that started with Pokemon Go. You’ll have to get out of the house and explore the real world and use AR to build structures and complete “adventure” events set in the Minecraft universe. You can also collect materials, craft items and smelt resources just like you can in the original version of Minecraft, but not without a few changes to adapt it to the AR-based mobile platform.
I’ve been jumping into Minecraft Earth here and there since the Australian release last week, and it’s definitely an interesting spin on existing AR-based mobile games like PoGo or Wizards Unite. You can expect a first impressions piece, and other Minecraft Earth content, coming soon.
Have you been able to dive into Minecraft Earth already, or are you still waiting for the game to release in your country? Let us know in the comments below.
United Kingdom. Jolly good!
South Korea
Canada
Philippines⁰