Sonic the Hedgehog meets Monkey Ball in this hilarious AR experience.
Lucas Rizzotto, a popular XR developer who co-founded AR House with fellow developer Aidan Wolf, has taken advantage of Snapchat’s Spectacles AR glasses to create Monke Racing, a hilarious AR game that has users racing against time to collect virtual bananas scattered throughout their real-world environment.
Users start by placing a trail of bananas anywhere throughout their physical space. To do that, they simply walk around and click the button on the frames of their Spectacles to place their digital fruit. Users can place as many bananas as they’d like, so the opportunities are virtually endless.
Depending on the course, you could be jumping over furniture, running behind bushes, crawling under a desk, zig-zagging through hallways, even running in figure 8’s in the middle of the street (just keep your eye on traffic) as you race against time to collect bananas and cross the finish line.
But it doesn’t end there, however. After all, this is Lucas Rizzotto we’re talking about, the same guy who built a VR time machine to visit his memories and created an AR portal so he could hang out with friends during the height of the pandemic. So of course there is going to be a twist.
The latest version of Spectacles can track movement and features Voice Scan. Rizzotto made sure his Monke Racing game utilized those technologies. “This lens has some technology built into it that analyzes how you are moving. And the more you move and sound like a monkey as you’re racing, the better your final score will be,” said Rizzotto in a video created by Snapchat.
The Lens is designed to bring out the inner child in all of us; to act silly and laugh alongside friends. For Rizzotto, the idea was to create an AR experience that encouraged people to engage with their environments in a different way.
David Meisenholder, a Sr. Product Designer at Snap Inc., tweeted out a video of himself using a scooter to play Monke Racing in his local park. The potential use-cases for such a game are virtually endless. Imagine an official X-Games competition in which competitors race to collect digital tokens scattered throughout an obstacle-ridden racetrack or a 5K marathon that tasks runners with crossing a certain number of virtual gateways.
Okay, so maybe those examples are a bit extreme. Monke Racing could be used as a tool for physical therapy, or as a way to encourage people to get off of the couch and exercise, much like the way Pokemon Go did back in 2016.
For now, Rizzotto is having a blast experimenting with different creations and helping other developers with the AR House.
You can check out Monke Racing by clicking here. To learn more about Lucas Rizzotto and other Snapchat Lens creators, click here.
Feature Image Credit: Lucas Rizzotto
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