Still Wearing a Real Mask for Halloween? How Analog of You!

By News Release | October 29, 2013

Still Wearing a Real Mask for Halloween? How Analog of You!

Halloween costumes can be so…analog. Until this season: Artist and Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) augmented-reality researcher Mark Skwarek has teamed with one of his grad students to create 3D digital masks.

Skwarek, an NYU-Poly instructor of integrated digital media, and Animesh Anad, a computer science graduate student, developed the virtual masks to launch an augmented reality game that turns the entire planet into a futuristic world in which real people and locations morph with fantasy.

Players use a mobile device and instructions on how to easily print out “markers,” which are a kind of colorful barcode about four inches square, to clip or tie into their hair or hat. By holding up a mobile device, the wearer suddenly appears wearing a digital mask – from cute kitty to ghoul, skeleton, or pumpkin-head. Through the 3D wonders of augmented reality, the viewer can walk around the masked wearer and peek around the sides to try to discover the wearer’s identity—just as one would at a costume ball.

The masks are part of what the augmented reality set call “wearables.” For the Brooklyn Art Fair, some 4,000 kids “wore” virtual dinosaur and monster costumes as their parents watched them on iPads and iPhones.

Skwarek predicts augmented reality technology will soon boom as future generations of Google Glass and competitors emerge. Gamers will no longer stare, nearly stationary, at video screens, but instead visit parks and other common areas, which have been mapped by game developers using GPS, where they will physically interact with others in realistic-looking settings overlaid with the creators’ imaginative additions, such as forts or castles. The same technology, already developed for mobile phones and pads by Skwarek, allows an interior designer or architect to walk clients into an unfinished building and see a 3D version of what the finished project will look like, while moving and turning for different views.

Skwarek is teaching the cutting-edge technology in classes and in a new augmented-reality lab opened at the NYU Media and Games Network (MAGNET) facility in the heart of Brooklyn’s Tech Triangle. In the spirit of NYU-Poly’s commitment to what it calls i-squared-e (Invention, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship), Skwarek and Anad are founders of the company Semblance AR. Its first offering is Play AR, the world’s easiest augmented reality video game-creation software in a mobile app. Play AR lets people with no programming experience create highly interactive augmented reality (AR) video games with just a few clicks—absolutely no programming knowledge required. In AR Battlefield, any real location on Earth transforms into a futuristic, multi-user augmented reality game. Its wearables include full body armor. To launch the game, the startup is offering the AR Halloween masks for a donation of as little as $5 to its Kickstarter campaign.

Learn more about Play AR’s Kickstarter campaign.

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