https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUQscPr8nM8

Those of you that are old enough to remember Laser Tag probably had an awesome childhood. Well, at least, if you got to play things like Laser Tag. Laser Tag is still around, of course, and there are other types of team competition sports like Nerf Gun Wars and Escape Rooms. The video above has been going around about an Augmented Reality group competition game in Japan. The video is intriguing, but the game itself is a bit hit and miss (of course, so were the commercials for Laser Tag). I would assume that, like Laser Tag, these Augmented Reality games need to be experienced to fully understand. But I like the idea – hope I get to try one some day myself. So here is hoping this becomes the next trend in group gaming. On the education side, it very possible to imagine someone creating educational games like this. Or creating online versions of these games for people to play with each other at a distance. I have been reading Daemon and Freedom™ by Daniel Squarez the past few months based on a recommendation from Amy Collier. Freedom™ especially adds a a layer of augmented reality into Suarez’s dystopian future that points to the ways that this kind of tech could be useful in real life (well, when not being used by an evil program to destroy humanity, that is). I highly recommend reading those books. Augmented Reality is expensive right now, of course, but will we see something like this take augmented reality mainstream? We shall see.