Android By Russell Holly Jan. 24, 2014 5:29 pm
While Google’s wearable computer has finally entered a stage where developers can freely write native apps for the platform, Google Developers have taken it upon themselves to offer up some guidance with a couple of mini-games that can be installed today.
Google Glass is still very much in its early stages of development, despite being such a hot topic for so long. Google still has no official plans to make the hardware available for public retail, but that has done little to stop the pace of internal development. Each month the Glass team pushes a new update to the firmware that adds new functionality and introduces more apps to the platform. Now that third party developers and their apps are being slowly approved by Google for Glass, the platform will take shape at an all new pace. There’s still one piece of the puzzle that is mostly missing though, and that’s gaming for the platform. While there have been several ideas out there in the past, Google hacked together a couple of mini-games to show off best practices when developing games for Glass.
The Mini-Games app for Glass consists of five different games for Glass that all focus on exploring a different kind of user interaction. The Clay Shooter game uses your head to control the crosshairs to take down small orange disks as they fly past you, after you shout “Pull!” to start the round. Matcher is a Glass-friendly memory game where you hover over tiles to match up shapes, again using your head to control the pointer. Shape Splitter offers Fruit Ninja*style gameplay, only you slash your hand in front of the Glass camera to take out the colorful shapes. Balance is a 2D accelerometer game that stacks boxes on a tiny person that you keep stable with your head, while Tennis uses your face as a racket to play a quick match in a 3D space.
Games for Glass aren’t entirely new, this is just the first time we’ve seen them with Google’s blessing. In fact, the Clay Shooter game is significantly less fun than Sean McCracken’s Psyclops game that we saw a couple of months ago. We’ve also seen concept suggestions regarding sync with existing games, like using Glass as a HUD for Grand Theft Auto. It’s a good sign of progress that Google is willing to entertain these options moving forward, and hopefully developers will latch on to this and turn them into even more fun for Glass users everywhere.
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Google Glass is still very much in its early stages of development, despite being such a hot topic for so long. Google still has no official plans to make the hardware available for public retail, but that has done little to stop the pace of internal development. Each month the Glass team pushes a new update to the firmware that adds new functionality and introduces more apps to the platform. Now that third party developers and their apps are being slowly approved by Google for Glass, the platform will take shape at an all new pace. There’s still one piece of the puzzle that is mostly missing though, and that’s gaming for the platform. While there have been several ideas out there in the past, Google hacked together a couple of mini-games to show off best practices when developing games for Glass.
The Mini-Games app for Glass consists of five different games for Glass that all focus on exploring a different kind of user interaction. The Clay Shooter game uses your head to control the crosshairs to take down small orange disks as they fly past you, after you shout “Pull!” to start the round. Matcher is a Glass-friendly memory game where you hover over tiles to match up shapes, again using your head to control the pointer. Shape Splitter offers Fruit Ninja*style gameplay, only you slash your hand in front of the Glass camera to take out the colorful shapes. Balance is a 2D accelerometer game that stacks boxes on a tiny person that you keep stable with your head, while Tennis uses your face as a racket to play a quick match in a 3D space.
Games for Glass aren’t entirely new, this is just the first time we’ve seen them with Google’s blessing. In fact, the Clay Shooter game is significantly less fun than Sean McCracken’s Psyclops game that we saw a couple of months ago. We’ve also seen concept suggestions regarding sync with existing games, like using Glass as a HUD for Grand Theft Auto. It’s a good sign of progress that Google is willing to entertain these options moving forward, and hopefully developers will latch on to this and turn them into even more fun for Glass users everywhere.
More...
