GDC 2011: The time is now for augmented reality mobile games says Ogmento's Terence Cohen

"We're in a perfect storm for Augmented Reality (AR) games" said Terrance Cohen, veep, games platforms at AR company Ogmento, previously head of engineering at US console developer Insomniac.

"Everyone now has smartphones with large touchscreens, cameras and 1 GHz processors. That's the reason I'm so excited about this sector and why I joined Ogmento."

He was giving at talk at the first GDC Smartphone Summit entitled Talking the Purple Pill: Lessons learned building a platform for geo-social augmented reality games.

[The purple pill is blends the red pill of reality and the blue pill of virtual reality]

Cohen argued, "AR is a game changer, but it takes some time to work out the subtle differences in terms of designing and making good AR games."

One example of technical difficulty he gave is this is that the rendering pipeline is a round trip for AR games, because they have to take into also account the real world scene, compared to a one way process for normal games, which are just dealing with the virtual scene.

Differences also need to be overcome in terms of production, especially in terms of how developers interact. In particular, rendering engineers and AR engineers have to communicate, otherwise you end up with what Cohen calls the Tech Demo Drop.

This is cool idea from one part of the development team, but one that can't be built on by the other side of the team - something that's bedeviled early AR games.

The company is particularly excited in terms of how AR technology links into geo-location social games.

It’s just launched one such example on iPhone called Paranormal Activity: Sanctuary, which has players running around cities, stopping demons breaking through into world. They also get to perform specific missions, for example, using the device’s camera to find and take an image of a demon, and unlock spells which can be cast using the company’s sketch technology.

Of course it also links into the likes of Facebook and others social platforms to encourage players to team up and compete for local high score and activity status.

Dealing more with the current technical issues, Oriel Bergig, Ogmento's veep of R&D looked at areas that will enable AR games to become mainstream.

Key among this are the current need to overcome the use printed out paper markers in order to provide a recognisable tag for the game to understand.

"Forcing people to print things out is a big barrier," Bergig argued.

Part of the solution comes with Ogmento's sketch-based solution, in which players can draw their own icons, which the game then understands. This is first being used in Ogmento's game Sketch Racer to generate the race track.

Other interesting areas of research, currently academic, include analysing the real world scene for lighting information that is then used to light the virtual model, making the game's entire visual representation much more solid.