Before Apple's June 2018 ARKit 2.0 multiplayer preview, DAS created the first of its kind FPS Multiplayer Smartphone AR Project, for Placenote SDK. In this game, players work with their friends to destroy the attacking AR Space Invaders - experiencing synched AR characters.
"ARZombi Bridge" was one of the first Mixed Reality First Person Shooters for a MR Headset. With Sponsorship funds from Occipital, players experience an attack from "life sized" holographic zombies invading their home. Players have reported a new level of terror when 6 foot tall zombies walk up to them in their home!
Before SLAM became mainstream with Apple's ARKit, we were working on how to deliver AR/MR to our theme park clients without having to put markers throughout their venues. "DAS Mesh" was born when we used Beacons to track user's smartphones, tablets, and/or now glasses/headsets with high precision. DAS Mesh works in settings where SLAM fails and in the indoors where GPS cannot reach.
AR Museum Ghost Hunt - Knotts Scary Farm Theme Park
About when Pokemon Go made headlines, DAS created the first successful AR experience deployed at a theme park: "Vision's Ghost Hunt". In a pitch dark museum, park-goers were handed "Phantom Finder Ghost Cameras" (customized iPads that saw in night-vision) which revealed supernatural characters that knocked over physical objects, shot at the crowd, and interacted with their environment via connection with Knott's animatronics, audio, and lighting servers.
Augmented Reality in the dark was an impossible problem - until we customized tablets to see in the infrared spectrum (see Knott's Scary Farm's Visions project below). Then we took innovation 1 step further and created an algorithm that allows any smartphone to detect markers in the dark without hardware customization! While traditional marker detection software requires markers to be illuminated by a minimum of around 25-30 LUX, our algorithm allows for marker detection at less than 1 LUX!
