Tired of the same old boring iPhone games where you tap a button to jump, or tilt the phone to keep balance? Well the appBlaster might just be the thing for you.
What the heck is an appBlaster?, you’re probably thinking. Well, a company called apptoyz has essentially taken a Wiimote rifle accessory and added a holder for your Android smartphone and a couple of capacitive rubber buttons. What this does is allow you to take the AR game Alien Attack and turn your whole house in to a battlefield.
As you may well know, an AR (Augmented Reality) game uses your device’s camera to show your surroundings on the screen, and the game will then (in this case Alien Attack) throw in some digital characters, effects and gameplay on top of those exact same surroundings.
Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Alien Attack takes your living room and has aliens attack you, jumping out from behind your very own sofa for example. You then have to shoot the aliens using one of the two different weapons, which both have their own dedicated buttons on the touch screen.
This is where the appBlaster comes in, your phone is connected into the cradle support on the top of the appBlaster and there are 2 capacitive rubber stamps that hover over the two different trigger buttons on screen. You then have a mechanism going from the trigger on the rifle to the button on the screen, so that when the trigger is pressed the button activates the on-screen command to fire the weapon.
It is an ingenius idea that will surely have us all commando rolling through our houses blasting the Alien Invaders!
Do you have any favourite Augmented Reality games? Share them with us with a comment or tweet @Gadget_Helpline.