Now you can interact with creatures in realistic 3D Augmented Reality worlds with your iPad or iPhone.
NETWORKED AUGMENTED REALITY WITH REAL-TIME PHYSICS
Pantomime Creatures AR is a significant advance, in graphics and interactivity, over the popular Pokémon GO app introduced this summer that showed an animated character superimposed over live video.
Player Pursuing, Feeding and Collecting Creatures in Living Room
Pantomime Creatures provides:
- real-time 3D — first-person graphics and navigation put your handheld in vivid 3D worlds
- realistic physics —interact with a scene full of 3D creatures simultaneously
– toss them food to make them bigger, or make them fly
– knock them into a collection basket with virtual snowballs to score
– scoop up and pour creatures and food from virtual cups - multiplayer — players on the same WiFi network can cooperate and see each others’ 3D movements in a shared world in real time
- an easy Help overlay lets you explore the options to navigate and interact
Boy and Another Player Wrangling Creatures with iPads
PLAY IN VIRTUAL WORLDS
Pantomime provides one of the only ways to reach into virtual worlds and play in 3D without an expensive tethered room scale VR system. In fact it doesn’t require ANY new hardware, You feel the VR rush of seeing a realistic 3D scene from your continuously changing point of view — but the view is in your hands, not around your head. It’s magical. And instead of being isolated, the person next to you sees it too. It works best on a fast iPad.
PANTOMIME CREATURES AR v POKEMON GO AUGMENTED REALITY
In some ways Creatures AR is reminiscent of Pokémon GO. We’re grateful that app put handheld augmented reality in the world’s consciousness this summer! It has shown everyone that AR can be much more social and less expensive than headset VR, and might be much more convenient and common in the long run. But Creatures AR isn’t about your location or maps — you can play anywhere and don’t have to buy lures or bait.
Our idea of Augmented Reality is that what you’re really holding in your hand — your tablet or phone — is in the virtual world too. You can touch creatures with it, feed them by tossing things from it, and carry things around in virtual cups attached to it. You can see where the software thinks your hands are, see them in a virtual mirror, and if you’re on a WiFi network you can even see other players’ devices and THEIR virtual hands as you play together!
So Creatures AR has much more detailed animation, 3D interaction and physics than the amazing Pokémon GO does. Creatures chase food, you chase them and chuck snowballs at them; some can fly, you can catch them or scoop them up in a cup, and if you want you can score by putting big creatures in a basket.
IMMERSED IN THE CREATURES WORLD
Your phone or tablet is balanced on a icy rink with a basket and mirror at one end.
Turn your device to look around, up, and down. You’re in an amazing new kind of first person augmented reality.
Baby dragons are hatching from a nest up above!
Mantis Attacks Young Dragon in Kitchen
GET THEM IN THE BASKET
You can push and paddle them in with your phone or tablet, or knock them in with Snowballs by tapping the screen with one finger. They’ll squeal with delight. If you miss, they’ll fall whistling into the space below.
Creature Menagerie in Mirror
GROW THEM BIGGER
Tap with 2 fingers to toss them green Growing Food. The bigger they are, the higher you’ll score. 10 is the highest. But careful ― overfeed them and they’ll deflate like balloons!
HELP THEM FLY
Tap with 3 fingers to toss them sky blue Flying Food.
While creatures are flying, it’s a great time to shove them towards the basket. When they run out of energy they may drop right in.
Dragons Feeding and Flying
CONNECT WITH ANY iPAD or iPHONE
Tap the Connect button and join another device running Pantomime Creatures on your WiFi network. You’ll see their mobile device and their virtual hands!
You’re in a new kind of augmented reality ― shared worlds you can reach into, where no one needs to put on a headset.
Pantomime Corporation has today launched the Pantomime Creatures AR app for iPads and iPhones, introducing a new kind of augmented reality that provides first person experiences and realistic, multiplayer 3D interaction using mobile devices.
EASY HELP
With one tap on the ? icon, players access all the help they need to get started, including interactive instructions for navigation and play. When the player is making the a tap or stroke gesture, it becomes highlighted in yellow. In the example, the user grabs the device screen with her thumb, to swing the device through the virtual world like a paddle. The other virtual hand lets go and the player can lift or turn the device off the surface, swinging from the wrist.
3D INTERACTION USING MOBILE DEVICES
Creatures AR provides a unique innovation in augmented reality: the mobile devices we all use become part of the virtual world. The tablet or phone a user is holding in reality appears in the virtual world too, along with animated hands to reflect a model of how the user is handling it. Devices can contact and collide with virtual objects, while their screens become mobile views into the virtual scene.
Dragons Just Fed blue Flying Food from Cup
PORTABLE AUGMENTED REALITY
Pantomime worlds are portable. Instead of setting up a special room as in room-scale VR, or going to a specific location as in Pokémon GO, Pantomime users carry a virtual world with them and can play anywhere. Users interact by tipping and turning their devices, walking them across virtual surfaces, grabbing and swinging them as paddles, and using simple screen gestures to move in 3D.
Dragons Flying and Feeding in Office
PLAYERS CARRY OBJECTS AND CREATURES IN VIRTUAL CUPS
Creatures AR lets users attach a virtual Cup to their device to carry creatures and food. Users can fill a cup with food, scoop up creatures from the virtual play surface, and pour out the contents by tipping their device over as they view the scene through it. Thus real devices, interactive objects, and animated characters are seamlessly combined in physically realistic 3D worlds. First person and multiplayer video shows players reaching into virtual worlds, catching flying dragons and other creatures in cups, and cooperating from multiple devices.
Carrying A Variety of Creatures in a Cup
Player Pours Food from Cup Attached to iPad by Tipping It
CONSUMER AUGMENTED REALITY GETS REAL
“Pokémon GO launched a new era where Augmented Reality isn’t about costly headsets or vision processing,” says Pantomime co-founder and CEO David Levitt. “Now Pantomime Creatures AR lets anyone interact in 3D, turning our phones and tablets into paddles and scoops for magical augmented worlds. Since no new hardware is required, these consumer experiences will continue to be the largest and fastest growing augmented reality markets.”
ABOUT PANTOMIME CORPORATION
Pantomime Corporation, with headquarters in Sebastopol, California, was founded by virtual reality pioneer Dr. David Levitt and Don Hopkins, core developer for the revolutionary app The Sims. The Pantomime Creatures app is available now at the App Store.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pantomime-creatures/id1126497893