Here’s a short promotional video for the upcoming Angry Birds game on the augmented reality headset Magic Leap One:
Finnish game development studio Rovio is bringing its flagship property, Angry Birds, to one of the most forward-looking devices on the market, the Magic Leap One. First unveiled early last month, the One is the first commercially available mixed reality headset from secretive Florida startup Magic Leap, which has amassed more than $2 billion in funding to create what it thinks is the future of media. The company is not quite there yet, as my colleague Adi Robertson argued in her hands-on impressions of the headset.
But Rovio, in partnership with Swedish virtual and augmented reality developer Resolution Games, is signing on to be one of the earliest game makers to build for Magic Leap’s platform as it evolves. The result of that investment is Angry Birds: FPS (short for First Person Slingshot). The game is your standard Angry Birds experience: you’re given a set of colorful anthropomorphic birds and a slingshot, and the goal is to fling your feathered friends into increasingly elaborate wooden and stone structures to take out nefarious green pigs. Although this time around, the structures, birds, and slingshot appear as virtual and interactive 3D objects existing in the real world.
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I spent about 30 minutes playing the game, and I can say that it is a remarkably intuitive, high-fidelity, and an all-around impressive display for Rovio’s first foray into AR. The company worked closely with Resolution Games, which has experience making VR games, to develop the game first as a VR title and then later as a full-fledged AR one that runs exclusively on the Magic Leap One.
Although the field of view for the One is roughly 50 degrees and still quite limited compared to, say, a VR headset, I found that to be about the perfect width and height for a full stage of Angry Birds to exist in front of you on a standard coffee table. So it’s clear Rovio and Resolution designed the game with the One’s FOV top in mind.