Zombies are everywhere and there is no use in hiding. Somewhere along the way to today’s current pop-culture landscape, some well-connected person must have been bitten by the zombie apocalypse fiction bug. Now after biting two friends, who in turn bite two other friends and so on, we have arrived in time when it is impossible to take a ride on a subway, turn on a radio or even play a videogame without being overwhelmed with visions of the undead.
So far the zombie influence has been a passive, creeping one. That stands to change now that a new augmented reality game for Orbotix’s Sphero robot will allow cities of tiny reanimated corpses to populate and overrun your world.
Sphero is a robot trapped in a ball that you can control remotely with a mobile device of your choosing. Available for iOS or Android devices, Orbotix’s toybot is a multi-use entertainment device that is joining the ever growing legions of consumer grade robots that bring virtual mobile entertainment to the physical world. With purposes as diverse as playing with it like a remote control car to the laziest game of fetch with your dog, the big innovation that Sphero brings to the table is in its augmented reality a game like the recently released The Rolling Dead.
One of the many augmented reality games planned to work with the little round robot, Rolling Dead sounds like your basic camera-based videogame with one important distinction: your input is physically manifested in the real world. Normally an augmented reality game, like Pokemon Dream Radar on the Nintendo 3DS, uses a front facing camera to supply the environment for virtual in-game occurrences to interact with and blur the border between fantasy and reality. When Sphero presses start, things are much different.
Imagine using this game on your kitchen table. You put the robo-ball on the surface, stand above it with your iPad facing down and start to move Sphero around with the touch controls. Suddenly, you see a cartoon zombie walking across your meal surface behind a coffee cup in an attempt to eat the robot’s (possibly) delicious brains on your screen. Your objective is to navigate Sphero to a physical location on the real life table that will allow it to shoot a virtual beam of exterminating fire on your tablet screen.
It is a unique form of play that really has fun with the idea of what virtual space is. Is this something that gaming markets will embrace? The reason that mobile gaming is so incredibly popular has quite a bit to do with the casual play-anywhere nature of handheld gaming that has kept mobile play alive and popular since the days of the Game Boy. That goes out the window when a peripheral device like an actual robot enters the playing field.
What The Rolling Dead immediately exemplifies is the idea that robotics can mesh with video gaming in really neat ways. Similar to the zombies that are slowly overstaying their cultural welcome as the go-to faceless villain in popular media, this game seems like a placeholder for some seriously game-changing robo-gaming technology that will come in the future.
