Star Wars’ Holochess: The Video Game (Kinda Sorta Almost)

  There are so many things from the Star Wars-verse that would make the real world a much, much more awesome place. Lightsabers, any number of those iconic spacecraft, Jar Jar B… wait, no. Not that jabbering ballache. But there’s a lot of Star Wars tech that I dearly hope the world's nerdly scientists are working on in secret.

 The biggest, for me, is something that only ever got a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it couple seconds of screen time in the first movie (which is to say, the fourth movie, which is to say, episodes 1-3 suck ass). Although it did give me a tingle of joy through my happy parts to see it briefly returns in The Force Awakens.  Yup, we’re talking Holochess.  

Buckle up, buddy boy, because this really is becoming an actual thing. More or less.

I’ve never been particularly convinced by AR games. Augmented Reality cards came with the PlayStation Vita and 3DS, using the systems’ cameras and QR scanners to make, for instance, UFOs fly around your living room for you to shoot down. A nice idea, but the effect was primitive as hell. But when Phil Tippett (artist and creator of Star Wars’ Holochess) tells us he’s busting out a monster-battling game loosely based on holochess, that’s something we can all get on board with.

Here’s Blastr with the skinny:

‘Tippett is hard at work on the monster-battling card game HoloGrid: Monster Battle, which is being designed for augmented-reality and virtual-reality platforms. The tech uses cards to make miniature monsters appear and battle. Though the augmented reality helps it stand apart, HoloGrid looks to be a spin on the classic Magic: The Gathering type of battle card game. Tippett is using a process called photogrammetry to make the monsters come to life on the game board. It’s similar to the tech Nintendo uses for its AR cards, as well as the PS3 game Eye of Judgment.’  

Enough said. Yes please.