Collaborative Augmented Reality Makes Beautiful Music

Researchers demonstrate a collaborative augmented reality game.
Credit: Courtesy of Columbia University.

Augmented reality (AR) places interactive, virtual objects and effects over the real world, and it has huge potential for gaming. Imagine wearing an AR headset to play chess with animated virtual pieces on a real chess board, or to fight computerized zombies running into your own home.

For this to happen, computer scientists need to make sure players’ views and motions are in sync, which is doubly hard with two players, because both players need to see the virtual objects in the same space. A new AR environment designed by computer scientists at Columbia University is a step toward this kind of two-player AR gaming. A game, dubbed “ARmonica,” lets two people create a floating, musical world to collaboratively make music.

Each player wears a pair of Vuzix AR glasses, through which they see a real-time video feed of their environment (slightly different for each eye). The players use Wii remotes superimposed with floating controls to place virtual bars in the space around them. Then, they can launch virtual balls at the bars. When the balls bounce off specific bars, the players hear a unique note. The headsets and remotes are tagged to help the program make sure both users see the virtual objects in the same locations.

The group, led by professor Steven Feiner, presented the work at the 2010 Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in New York last month.