Ad-Pro Media

First discovered via CC_Chapman on Twitter which led us over to the cool folks over at AdFreak, the following video is a very tasty demo of some leading edge handheld gaming design.

This submission was made collectively by several teams including those at Georgia Tech, Graz University of Technology, and SCAD Atlanta, the game was previewed at the Indiecade 2009 event held at E3 this year.

The game focuses on immerses handheld gaming players by having them physically ‘work’ with a 2D environmental map. A bit hard to explain but once you watch the video, you quickly get the picture. “Augmented reality,” is an interesting hybrid of the real physical world in a sense and video. The Eye of Judgement game for the Playstation 3 that came out back in 2007 was a precursor of this type of technology.

Recently, you may have seen the very cool augmented reality work for GE’s Smart Grid using something called the FLARToolkit which is very cool. The good folks at nVidia provided a devkit for the project for a new mobile device called Tegra nvidia is developing. which allowed them to make the zombie game called “ARhrrrr”. A key part of the game is how the developers created the use of real world Skittles as mines that you activate by placing them on a 2D real world map. Very cool and very smart to show how sponsors can be artfully employed within a game.

I think you could argue that this is probably where advergaming should be headed and is vastly superior to current offerings of advergames I have seen on the web.