The power of an inspired gaming otaku: Holographic Yugioh
Throughout our entire history, man has been inspired to the extraordinary by flights of fantasy. Icarus and his ill fated journey near the sun led to the Wright Brothers, leading to the creation of the propeller plane. Leonardo and his fantastic machines. Even the creation of our tablets were inspired by Star Trek's space age technology. No idea is too foolish, because it might become possible one day. To quote a certain ad slogan, Impossible is Nothing.
Despite my previous article, and the notoriety of Konami amongst the gaming industry and fans alike, they do possess a few gems still. One of this is Yugioh, the phenomenal card game that has taken the world by storm.
One of the biggest appeals of Yugioh was its amazing duels. The card game, in real life, is pretty boring. You throw down tiny pieces of paper, do some maths, and move on to the next match. Yawn. It does not help that the wall of text some cards have means you'd be reading them carefully midgame, slowing the game way down. Now selling pieces of paper and ink is lucrative business for anyone, but it does not tend to inspire.
The anime gives you a pretty good idea of what the creator, Takahashi Kazuki (one of the richest mangaka in the world) had in mind. Everything is holographic! Even your entire backdrop will change depending on what field you set. So when, in the anime, the Norse god Odin was summoned, this was what everyone saw.
The city looks small by comparison. Now no one is expecting this level of VR tech yet. We already have working models of a holographic computer keyboard years back, and games have been steadily advancing towards virtual reality. But when the closest I could find to anything resembling the original vision was this:
Disappointing is an understatement. Considering, as you can see from here, the project was started way back in 2010. Augmented Reality is just more like fake VR. So it looked like nothing will never happen in our lifetimes. Until I saw this.
This looks fantastic. The cards are arranged exactly like how the manga portrayed a duel! And they are huge! No more squinting at tiny text! And he's doing it right in front of his house!
This is how it looks when you summon monsters. And it is all 3D. Generalkidd did this with Microsoft's HoloLens.
Now obviously we are loooong way from a realistic VR app. The monsters are not even animated, and everyone will have to own HoloLens to be even able to watch the duel. But bear in mind that is this the first step of an inspired fan with no funding. He probably isn't even be a VR professional. And yet he is able to get this far on his own.
He's not stopping either. This video was just posted on June 6th, with the following text:
"Ever since I was little, I was quite fascinated about the prospect of being able to play Yugioh in real life with actual holograms. Well, thanks to Microsoft's HoloLens, that is now finally possible. This is just a very early version of this game and there's a lot of work that still needs to be done. If anyone wants to help out "
Already Devpro, the developers of YugiohPro, the biggest opensource online dueling program, have already contacted him directly in the comments below. Now this might end up being nothing. But as long as there are dedicated people out there, willing to pursue their dreams, someday, it might become reality.
Written by Don
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