If you weren’t excited by the prospect of augmented reality gaming before then this rendition of Valve’s excellent puzzle game Portal, running in the real world, will cure you of that. Failing that, perhaps you’ve got a faulty excitement module installed. We’ll get GlaDOS to troubleshoot you later.
The game, the creation of AR developer Kenny W, isn’t an officially sanctioned Valve creation. For all that, it looks an awful lot like the classic title. There are two different coloured portals, a trusty Companion Cube, and a whole lot of mind-melting physics on show.
Kenny’s demonstration overlays Portal mechanics onto conventional surfaces, making it the closest we’ll get to actually wielding a Portal Gun (barring a sudden breakthrough at Aperture Science, that is). Throwing the cube into portals results in familiar actions, like bobbing from place to place when the holes are set in the floor, and we even saw one of the talking turrets from the game being taken out by a teleported Cube. This… has some serious possibilities.
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The Portal demo may not be official but it’s still an indicator of what is possible with AR tech. It’s running on one of Microsoft’s pricey Hololens units, so don’t expect to see it being widespread yet. It’s just a taste of things to come, as the wise Shang Tsung once said.
Source: KennyWdev (YouTube)