Bose Showcases audio games for Bose AR glasses, which enhances the world around you with sound.
The Bose AR glasses have sensors that can detect your movements, and they connect via Bluetooth to your smartphone to fetch Global Positioning System data to determine which way you are looking and moving. The glasses can send sound to your ears that comes from a certain direction.
Bose came out with these glasses a year ago, and it set up a $50 million fund to get developers to make applications for the Bose AR glasses.
An indie game studio in Boston, Worthing & Moncrief, made a game called Overherd to work with the glasses.
Eric Hamel, one of the developers, explained how it worked. The game was a comic take on the opening scene of Monty Python & the Holy Grail, where a French knight in a castle taunts King Arthur.
Your job is to listen to the French knight’s voice and figure out where he is in a circle around you. You turn to face him, double tap your glasses, and let loose a catapult throw a cow at the castle eliminating the French knight as he taunts you.
. If you hear a crash, you’ve hit his castle with the flying cow. If you moved your chin up or down, you could change the elevation of the targeting.
“They tasked us with creating an augmented reality experience that put audio first,” Hamel said. “It’s nod and a wink to the absurdist British comedy of the 1970s. This is the cutting edge of audio AR.”
To use the glasses, you open the Bose Connect app and make sure your app is updated. Then you can access Bose AR-enhanced apps.
There’s a lot of potential for this technology, in everything from virtual sightseeing, or sighthearing, to games with spatial awareness.
