Pantomime Launches Creatures App with Shared Augmented Reality
Pantomime Corporation has today launched the Pantomime Creatures app for iPads and iPhones, introducing a new kind of augmented reality that provides realistic first person 3D interaction and real-time multiplayer over WiFi.
NETWORKED AUGMENTED REALITY WITH REAL-TIME PHYSICS
Pantomime Creatures represents a significant advance over the popular Pokémon GO app introduced this July, which showed individual animated characters superimposed over live video as a targets for Poké Balls.
Pantomime Creatures provides
• real-time 3D — first-person graphics and navigation put users in vivid 3D worlds.
• realistic physics— users interact with multiple 3D creatures simultaneously as they toss them food,
scoop up and pour creatures and objects from virtual cups, and knock them into a creature collection
basket with virtual snowballs.
• synchronous multiplayer — users on the same WiFi network can play together, seeing each others’ 3D
movements in a shared world in real time.
3D INTERACTION USING MOBILE DEVICES
Pantomime Creatures 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 how the user is handling it. Devices can contact and collide with virtual objects, while their screens become mobile views into the virtual scene. Users can tip, turn, tumble, walk, paddle and swing their devices through the scene, stroke the screen to move and turn, and tap the screen to throw objects, in a portable experience that requires no external sensors or
advance setup.
PLAYERS CARRY OBJECTS AND CREATURES IN VIRTUAL CUPS
Pantomime Creatures lets users attach a virtual Cup to their device to carry creatures and food. Users can fill a cup with food, scoot under flying creatures to catch them, scoop things up from the virtual play rink, 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.
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 lets anyone interact in 3D, turning our phones and tablets into paddles and scoops to use in augmented worlds. Since no new hardware is needed, 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 hit franchise The Sims. The Pantomime Creatures app is available today at the App Store.
