Spec Ops

Inspiration

The classic birthday tradition, a favorite of kids and adults, and something that was once restricted to overpriced backrooms of arcades, now Laser Tag is accessible to anyone with Spectacles!

From the comfort of your home, the chaos of the outdoors, and anywhere you can imagine, challenge your friends to everyone's favorite game. Experience the nostalgia of your childhood alongside the futuristic technology exclusive to Snap Spectacles' incredible AR experience.

We were inspired by the theme of "Illumination," and set about to take our favorite activity, and bring that joy to every possible environment. This came true as we turned our school classrooms, green spaces, and dorm hallways into exciting battle grounds in Spec Ops.

The application builds on Spectacles' unique real world co-location kit:

Position syncing to view other players in the world
Global leaderboard showing the scores of every player competing in the same session
World mesh building interactable targets and obstacles out of real world objects

Challenges we ran into

There were plenty of challenges in syncing the experience of both users. We also constantly had to rethink our design and simplify in order to optimize the experience for any user. We initially generated lasers, but have transitioned to a much more aesthetic and pleasing ball that shoots at the target.

Accomplishments we’re proud of

We are really proud of our persistence in such a short time period. We were digging through documentation for hours testing novel approaches to unprecedented tasks to prove our concept on a scale unseen on the platform.

What's next for Spec Ops

Plans:

Our first goal would be to add a teams feature. We did not have access to enough Spectacles to test 2v2 competition so we left it at free for all for the time being.
We would love to implement power ups, customizable virtual walls and shelters, and different types of bullets if we had more time.
This technology could be applied to countless fields outside of just a laser tag game. The targeting feature could be used to ping a message to someone across the room without anyone else noticing, the world interaction could be used for optimal pathfinding for robots or mapping instructions, and the point system could simulate popularity of different real world objects or locations based on how often people's actions collide with them.