Yu-Gi-Oh! is a Japanese anime series that focuses around competitive card dueling with holographic monsters. The characters are often battling it out with projected images of the ‘monsters’ in the TV series and movies. Generalheed, team member of Gold Team Productions, recently released a video of a project he’s working on which aims to make the cards from the anime series a reality through augmented reality and HoloLens.
As the cards turn towards a different direction, the monster holographic turns along with it. The feature is part of a major update to the full project that will also include online multiplayer dueling. It is set to roll out as Update 3 which will be the first playable version of the card game, however the release date has not been confirmed.
In a thread on Reddit, Generalheed explained that the reason this is possible is due to the use of Vuforia. Many interested developers joined the Early Access Program for the beta of Vuforia’s HoloLens support. The latest update on their blog mentioned that “native HoloLens support will be integrated in the public SDK soon.” However, that was released at the beginning of August alongside the release of their upgraded version Vuforia 6.
The new release introduced a new feature for HoloLens called, VuMark. It was described by Microsoft as, “a customizable visual code that can be affixed to any product or machine – either manually using a decal, or automatically printed during the manufacturing process. It is intended to visually indicate to a user that an AR experience is available, such as step-by-step instructions for assembly, use, cleaning, repair, inspection, etc.”
With the use of Adobe Illustrator, developers could create visual markers that would include data for the HoloLens to read. In this case, the images of the Yu-Gi-Oh! card monsters signals the device to pull up a 3D image of the specific monster.
The creator of the card game prototype for HoloLens mentioned that he’s new to using Vuforia and that the tool’s support for HoloLens is still in very early access with a lot of issues to be worked through.
