Augmented Reality Cornhole

Inspiration

With all of the excitement buzzing around augmented reality (i.e. our office is a PokéStop), we wanted to tinker with AR technology and flex our creative muscles in Jackrabbit Labs. We started gathering inspiration by researching the different types of AR apps out there, especially mobile games. What we discovered was that most AR games currently on the market required players to print out a marker, a reference point that allows the phone’s camera to position the game.

The appeal of mobile AR for our team was how easy it was to start playing a game just about anywhere, regardless of environment or materials. The idea of having to print out and carry a piece of paper around was a design challenge that we wanted to tackle.

From a brainstorming session came the idea of translating cornhole — the popular lawn game — into an augmented reality experience, and that’s what we sought out to do.

Design Process

Our team started the design process by doing technical discovery, which involved downloading different SDK libraries and playing around with sample applications. We narrow it down to two libraries: ARToolKit and Vuforia. We decided to go with Vuforia because it allowed players to create user-defined targets. Our software architecture included OpenGL as the renderer, SceneKit as the physics engine and asset generator, and Vuforia as the AR framework.

(Read more in-depth analysis in our Technical Breakdown.)

After the initial design and groundwork set by various members of our team, our iOS developer extraordinaire, Hunter, took the lead and built out the majority of the app.

Going back to the marker challenge, we were able to build a custom marker-making feature, i.e. the ability to create a user-defined target. That means that a player can grab any nearby object that’s flat with high contrast (such as a beach towel or magazine cover) and turn it into their very own marker. We haven’t encountered this type of solution anywhere else in regards to mobile games.

During our research, we learned that for most mobile AR games, such as ARBasketball, the screen view of the game experience was usually engaging and immersive, but the motion range was limited to a simple swipe gesture. For example, shooting a basketball translated to swiping upward on the phone to “shoot” the ball into the hoop. We thought that a swipe only motion broke the illusion of a blended experience (physical and virtual). For our cornhole game, we wanted to preserve the “normal” motion of tossing. We incorporated that into our features, so a player in ARC can toss upward like they would with a real bean bag. We also kept the simple swipe motion as an alternative tossing option.

Another feature we decided to build was a leaderboard to encourage competition and incentivize game play. If a player allows location access, a local leaderboard appears which tracks the top weekly scores within a 2.5 mile radius. If a player does not allow location access, they’ll see a global leaderboard which tracks the top weekly scores of other players who chose not to share their location.

ARC is now available for iOS and, as the first iteration of our labs project, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Download the free game, submit feedback, and invite your friends!