Storybridge

I remember running around the streets near our home when I was a kid with a toy rifle desperately trying to find where my enemies were hidden. Peeking around the corner I’d see my best friend (and for the time being, mortal enemy) unsuccessfully hiding behind a garden wall.

‘Bang. Bang!’ and other more enthusiastic and realistic sounding gun noises emanate from me as I triumphantly point the rifle at my obviously vanquished foe. ‘You’re dead! You’re dead!’

‘No! You missed! You missed!’

And on and on. Fun but frustrating times indeed.

Gunmen for the iPhone solves this age old dilemma of who has indeed actually shot who for the kids and adults of today. Yes, paintball has already accomplished this but you don’t always have the equipment to hand I’d hope and it’s a tad messy.

The basics of it are then that it is an augmented reality first person shooter that enables you to point your iPhone camera at your mate / enemy, line him up in your crosshair and shoot the scoundrel. And of course he can do likewise to you. Up to four iphones can be linked up at the moment via WiFi so that you can run around the office with your colleagues shooting the banjo out of each other. All hits and misses are recorded so no more arguments about who has been shot or not.

At the start of the game you pick the shirt colour of your enemy and this is how the application recognises your foe and whether a hit has been made. It also records hits so that you can share them with friends online. Christian Zibreg has written an excellent review of Gunmen at geek.com so please feel free to go there for more in depth details.

Hiding behind trees then in real life whilst your mate tries to zap you. Great stuff. Augmented Reality has its detractors as just a gimmick but I hope that this sort of thing will open peoples eyes to the simple proposition that if you give us a screen we can put anything on it. And if this screen is showing you the real world around you then all the better for us to let our imaginations run and give you an immersive experience.

The game producers Shadowforce are apparently bringing in geo location technology to a future release. Here’s where things get even more interesting. I’d envisage that you won’t need to specifically create a game with your friends whilst all together in the same place. You can have one that never ends. It’s always ‘on’. Track your friend down via the mapping technology and blast him when he least expects it. At a restaurant when about to propose to his lady would no doubt go down very well.

iPhone Gunmen app at Apple Store.

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