STACKAAR - Active AR

STACKAAR Circuit is an Augmented Reality obstacle course for robots. The game is played in the real world and the robot is controlled by the physical movement of a player.

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In a brief

Just when nobody expected it, a portal into another dimension opened and revealed an extraterrestrial… factory. Full of cute and clumsy robots. We learned that they are called Robiks, they belong to different departments and have different abilities. Junior Robiks are sent to Earth to train and learn the ropes of factory work. The Robot Resources Department organized a weekly competition – each Robik can run through an obstacle course – training different skills. Then they can submit their result to the competition.

Fastest Robiks will win prizes and will be promoted.

Help the Robiks train for the future missions. Every bolt counts, every wrench matters!

STACKAAR Circuit is an Augmented Reality obstacle course for robots. The game is played in the real world and the robot is controlled by the physical movement of a player. Each obstacle is different and robots from different departments have slight advantages for specific obstacles.

What it does

STACKAAR Duel is a Multiplayer Augmented Reality game with a unique gameplay. From the very first moment when Robik greets you – you literally step into the game. The only way to play – is to move in the space – leading your Robik to his next task.

This game is made of two easy to learn but hard to master elements – collecting/building, shooting/avoiding. But when put in the real world with real physics and your body is the game controller – the game feels incredibly realistic.

Now we have 10 different Factory Departments, where each department is responsible for different Factory activity. Departments differ in color, you can see that Red Robiks are from the Safety Department and Cyan – Energy Department. Each Robik has special abilities, reflected in his Main Body Equipment, Head, Exhaust and Apron.

We are building the new part of STACKAAR where the unique Robiks have different abilities and different equipment, based on the NFT parameters. The NFTs are listed in Keepsake Digital Assets Collection. We are listing them on keepsake and our players are able to purchase different Robiks to play different quests – related to the Factory Department they are from. Then the players can level up their Robiks and duel other players in the real world, just like in this demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a3Ib6_e2hm-y_LC_g6Q6ExQlRcP1eZ9m/view?usp=sharing

For this hackathon we've built yet another gameplay framework – STACKAAR on Pico. Players who own Pico headset will be able to log in with their account and play with their Robiks in a VR environment – enjoying new levels and quests. Building for VR headset expands the Robik Universe and gives many more new ways of interacting with the game.

How we built it

The whole team really likes sci-fi and robots. And we really love mech-fights. We just finished a different project where a player controls a creature by physically moving in the real world and we felt like it’s time to bring robots to action.

We wanted to make a game that will be our visit card – a game that shows our way of doing AR. All our games have the player controlling the gameplay by physically moving in the real world. And STACKAAR was dreamed to be an ultimate mover. We just wanted to make a fun grab and shoot game, something between a snowball fight and a food fight. But we knew it had to involve robots. So after long months of development and brainstorming, trying different ideas and choosing only what feels the best – you can play STACKAAR. The robots are cute and clumsy, the gameplay is pretty simple, but only when you try it out – seeing the robots whizzing around in your room, you get the unique immersive feeling only Active AR can give.

Challenges we ran into

We always strive to increase levels of immersiveness, this is why pass-through AR is a great opportunity to bring STACKAAR to the next level, and let the players feel like they are stepping into the game. It is quite challenging to disattach Google Anchors elements from a shared AR persistent anchos mobile AR game and reimplement world awareness and SLAM capabilities from a different platform. But once we got through it -- the game is ready give players an incredible experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to build a playable version of STACKAAR for Pico and try it and even pass the whole obstacle course.

What we learned

We learned that playing in pass-through AR is a great experience and with more improvements of the headset cameras, sensors and screens it's gonna get even better. We realised that playing in a large room feels really good and that we would love to be able to utilise more world understanding -- like surfaces and meshes and segmentation of objects. We would love to be able to create a larger play area or even keep it completely unlimited, since passthrough AR reduces the risk of colliding with obstacles since the majority of the real world is visible.

What's next for STACKAAR - Active AR

Our next steps will be to build the Duel mode and integrate the full VR obstacles and remote multiplayer.

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