News

Zombie Gunship Reality and Google’s Project Tango come together

Project Tango is a venture that Google is undertaking by designing hardware that is able to render models of its surrounding environment. Tango’s sensors take over a quarter of a million measurements every second to update the position of the phone. It then takes all the information and fuses it into a single 3d model of its environment. Why would that matter to gamers like ourselves? I’m glad you asked! Here’s why: for example it’s able to scan a room to create a 3D rendering.

That rendering, in turn, can be used to generate a game world in that same, physical room. According to Google, Tango is a platform that developers can build upon. Devices aren’t commercially available yet, but Google intends to sell them to developers later this year (at a whopping $1,024 a piece, for those of you scoring at home). Limbic Software has taken advantage of this opportunity and announced a forthcoming game called Zombie Gunship Reality, which is also slated to be released later this year.

Here is a YouTube video of how one would play this game:

In this game, set during the zombie apocalypse, players ride inside an AC130 gunship that’s equipped for ground assault, only in this case the targets aren’t alive to begin with.  Players will be tasked with defending those that have survived the zombie apocalypse up to that point by raining down lead and ordnance upon the zombies from the aerial perch, through the perspective of an infrared scope. By talking advantage of all the aforementioned sensors in project Tango, the player must move about in real life, to change the in-game perspective on the device. For example, if you wanted to zoom in and get a closer view of the ground, you would move the device closer to the ground by kneeling or crouching; in order to achieve a higher vantage point, the player would be required to climb on top of something like furniture.

Needless to say, not only will this level of interaction put a new spin on mobile gaming, it will really open up a new world of gaming, and it’s exciting to see developers such as Limbic already jumping on this. All that being said, Limbic has yet to give a specific release date, or pricing, so we’ll have to wait and see what comes of both those issues.

Share This

You Might Also Like