AR-Defense

AR-Defense is an augmented reality tower defense game. Build towers to defend your table top - use the smartphone as a “window into the virtual world”.

The Idea

The game has been developed during a university project, that dealt with virtual environments and user interaction. Our group consisting of Tobias Hagemann, Marcus Held, Gennady Solomenikov and me wanted to create a tower defense game, using augmented reality techniques to interact with the game.

The Smartphone acts like a “window into the virtual world” that can be moved to navigate. The player can position towers by moving a special marker around and then finally place the tower via a tap on the screen. Furthermore the player can draw the path that enemies walk on by hand and then scan it in the beginning of a game. We followed this approach to create a truly immersive experience.

Technical Overview

The Vuforia framework is responsible for tracking the game markers. For rendering purposeses we used the free and open source scenegraph API Rajawali, which has been developed specifically for 3D graphics on Android. The recognition of hand drawn paths is implemented in terms of our own image processing algorithm.

The roles within the project cannot be clearly distinguished as we worked together a lot and solved the most demanding tasks as a team. Neverthless one can say that my main responsibility was the fusion of Vuforia’s input data and the underying game logic.

Demo

You can download a demo including the apk file, the markers to be printed and usage instructions. Keep in mind that this is to be considered a “proof of concept” instead of a fully polished game.