Since there's not much info on this, and since I missed the relevant thread last week, I'll just note here for the record that Mojang's <i>other</i> recent release, a browser-based retro game called Minecraft Classic, was built on my voxel game engine.<p>[game] <a href="https://classic.minecraft.net/" rel="nofollow">https://classic.minecraft.net/</a><p>[engine] <a href="https://github.com/andyhall/noa/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/andyhall/noa/</a><p>if anyone's interested. It's pretty weird waking up one morning to find out that Mojang built a game on your tiny solo project...
This reminds me of when I first discovered Minecraft in university. I was just going to play for a couple hours before bed, and I got sucked into the game-loop and before I knew it the sun was coming up. A few days later, I was walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to wait at between my house and campus, and just for a moment looked at those tracks and I seriously thought about where I should place the Minecraft blocks to build a bridge and avoid waiting for the train.<p>I decided to take a long break from Minecraft after that.
This looks ambitious enough to be met with skepticism. What matters most for gameplay is the UX implementation and AR has serious barriers to overcome in that regard. Holding a device up at eye level for extended periods, interacting with the game by touching the same device that is also serving as the viewport and battery limitations are just a few practical hurdles that have yet to be overcome.<p>What is really hard to believe is that one can recapture the experience or something close to it and that this is not just the expansion of a brand into a new product. Like Pokemon Go, this will likely be Minecraft's equivalent to the Star Wars Christmas Special but without the "so bad it's good" quality.
The ad for Minecraft Earth, reminds me of a cyberpunk novel, Spook Country, by William Gibson.<p>In the novel, there are layers of augmented reality where people have put their mark on the world with AR Dioramas scattered through-out the world. In the book, AR scenes might depict historical events, art, or information.<p>If your planing on Playing Minecraft:Earth, you might want to check it out.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country</a><p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-Ant-Book-ebook/dp/B000UVBSYQ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18ZCM1YV438V2&keywords=spook+country&qid=1558106487&s=digital-text&sprefix=spook+country%2Caps%2C203&sr=1-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-Ant-Book-ebook/dp/...</a>
Really neat idea and has the potential to be the next Pokemon Go in terms of engagement, kids roaming around to build in certain real world areas, etc.<p>(Though I am a little sad it's not Minecraft but with a single 'world' server where every player is present.. I would LOVE that :-))
I am already disappointed by the vast gulf between how I imagine Minecraft could work as an AR game and how I imagine it will initially be implemented as an AR game.<p>The problem with Ingress and Pokemon Go, is that the player has to go places in real life to have fun in the game, and one attraction of fantasy sandbox worlds is that you have mobility capabilities that are impossible in your real life.<p>In regular Minecraft, creative mode, you can fly and hover. This is extremely alluring to a kid who may otherwise only be able to ride a bicycle around their own boring subdivision neighborhood during daylight hours. Hey, it's even nice for people who have cars. If the kids have to beg Mom or Dad to drive them across town in the real world to mine virtual diamonds, that's not going to end up being fun for anybody.<p>People play games where they live, and if the AR game does not include people's homes as a legitimate place to play, then having fun includes some amount of inconvenience that sours it. Some people can tap a Pokestop or Portal from their bedroom or living room. Other people have to drive ten minutes to reach the nearest one.<p>The best I can come up with is that players use their mobile devices in the real world to mark their territory or drop warp points or exchange friend tokens or do discovery, and they can still build or explore the whole world from home. Geo-tagged photos might be able to update textures and geometry.<p>If someone builds a grand castle in the neighborhood park, that's not going to work in AR if you have to climb stairs that don't exist or go below ground when there is no real-world hole. But maybe you could see there is a castle there, through the discovery glass at the park, tap the block that grants your user read-only visitor access to it, and then go back home to climb the tower or explore the dungeons.<p>If someone else builds a different castle overlapping over the same territory, you can decide which user's construction appears in your personal sandbox.
From the looks of the promotional video (glassy boxes displayed around every object), it seems like the implementation of this is closer to "geotagged Minecraft objects, which are NPCs or finite-sized voxel volumes" than "Minecraft overlay on the real world". I'd consider that to be a safe-but-boring option for them to go with - the implementation is easier and you can probably control access to your creation to prevent it from being destroyed by griefers, but on the other hand there will probably be no way two discrete objects could be spontaneously linked up in a creative way, no irreverent and <i>fun</i> third-party modifications to objects of the sort that their creators would have rejected if asked to allow upfront but would grudgingly admit to be pretty clever afterwards, and (although the last point is quite subjective) interacting with what are essentially more intricately customised Google Maps pins will probably never feel as immersive as navigating a unified overlay to the real world.
This doesn't look like a freeform building game. It's really hard to tell from the trailer but it looks like you can pick some pre-fab constructions or animals and plop them down into specific places in the world.<p>Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right
1) boring
2) that will at least keep minecraft earth from being covered in swastikas and genitalia
This looks like an expansion of Microsoft’s hololens tech demo from a few years ago, which did a lot of work around identifying in-room surfaces and allowing building on them.<p>I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this will be very very popular. This is pitched as virtual collaborative lego, but you get to use your phone at the same time.<p>Hopefully we will see artists play around with it as well; William Gibson wrote a little about AR-based art in the blue ant trilogy; I always thought it was an idea worth thinking a little more about.
It would be really cool if this enables "Minecraft artists" to build and place impressive models. I'm an avid hiker and would love knowing I can pull out my phone at the top of a mountain to see a digital model that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. Sort of like an imaginary geocache.
To me, this feels like the perfect app for AR. It's creative (you make stuff) and your creations live in the real world, encouraging people to get out there.<p>If this turns out to be a really great app and it isn't successful, I wonder if we can take that as a signal from the market that people aren't that interested in AR, at least not in its current phone-based state.
This is brilliant... and PKDickian (is this a term? it should be).<p>We can imagine a distopic future with a thin boundary between the physical world and VR where you would travel through totally destitute neighbourhoods in real life, while seeing great works of art in VR that were built by the users of a virtual world game akin to this.
This will probably be huge. Minecraft is still super popular, and being able to show off cool real-world footage on YouTube will fuel the fire, engaging others.
In the official reveal trailer, they seriously have the actor take out their phone and walk backward into the road while looking at their phone. Who cleared that?<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/dYKxBKj29dI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/dYKxBKj29dI</a>
This existed in 2012, and was called “minecraft reality”:<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/25/3688674/minecraft-augmented-reality-iphone-app" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/25/3688674/minecraft-augmen...</a>
<p><pre><code> Sorry!
This version of Minecraft
requires a keyboard.
Please try again on another device.
</code></pre>
But I <i>have</i> a bluetooth keyboard connected to my phone...
Reminds me of "Rainbows End". Remember the scene when the kids go to school and overlay the building on the way?
(And all the other overlays/skins.)
This is my favorite augmented reality game:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/8t4pmlHRokg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/8t4pmlHRokg</a>
Notes from the FAQ:<p>> Minecraft Earth will be free to play.<p>> Minecraft Earth is coming to iOS and Android this summer on AR-capable devices. We’ll have more to share soon.
<i>> Picture the scene: you’re walking through your neighbourhood and see a patch of grass. Grass is lovely and all, but you see this patch every day. It’s getting a little dull and is practically begging for a talented builder to brighten it up. So you take out your phone and craft a beautiful Minecraft build on a nearby picnic table. Then you place your colourful new Minecraft creation on the real-life grass.</i><p>So now we're gamifying gentrification and incentivizing the idea of covering the earth with human constructions? (It's certainly arguable, but at least Pokemon Go encourages physical activity and social interaction.)<p>Yes, I know I'm being reactionary but this just feels wrong, not to mention a misguided application of the Minecraft concept. Is this is the best they could do? Is this really all we can expect of AR at this stage?
I want to see a gameplay video. the occlusion effect in AR doesn't seem to be easy to implement. I previously saw a startup doing it using a detailed 3d scan of a city.
Part of me is like "this is dope!" and another part of me is like "are we so lazy/poor due to income inequality that actually learning how to build things is out of the picture now?"
You “see a patch of grass” could read awfully dystopian. That opening paragraph might come back to haunt them. With climate change possibly accelerating unless global coordinated activity, I giggled at first to this opener that basically says cover that “patch” of “real-life” nature.<p>> <i>Picture the scene: you’re walking through your neighbourhood and see a patch of grass. Grass is lovely and all, but you see this patch every day. It’s getting a little dull and is practically begging for a talented builder to brighten it up. So you take out your phone and craft a beautiful Minecraft build on a nearby picnic table. Then you place your colourful new Minecraft creation on the real-life grass.</i>