If you’re as old as me, you’d have fond memories of Super Mario Bros as one of the first video games that a lot of us got addicted to. One of the pioneering and highly influential titles of all time, Super Mario Bros. was a platform video game developed and published by Nintendo for the NES home console.
But it’s 2017 now, and Abhishek Singh, a 28-year-old NYU ITP graduate has recreated the iconic first level of Super Mario Bros in augmented reality with Microsoft HoloLens. Abhishek says that as he began playing with the HoloLens, he wanted to make some sort of outdoor running experience.
While learning the absolute basics of HoloLens development, I literally placed a cube in a scene and for some reason jumped right under it and that’s when the idea of recreating Mario struck me. I grew up playing Mario and it was as if it all the memories came rushing back.
Watch this fascinating video of him playing the game in Central Park in New York City. As he specifies in the video, it was recorded entirely through the HoloLens without any post-production.
Built in Unity 3D, the experience required modeling all the assets and elements of the game and rethink the experience from a real-world 3D perspective. In a chat with me, Abhishek mentioned that the maximum time was spent on tweaking the game to work in a large outdoor setting, something the HoloLens is not necessarily designed for.
While we won’t be able to see the game on Windows Store for obvious copyright issues, he’s considering sharing the code on GitHub.
The final level was more than 110m long, and Abhishek is thinking of creating some of the underground levels of the game in the NYC Subways next. Now that will be really cool, wouldn’t it?
P.S. Big props to Abhishek Singh for dressing up as Mario while shooting the demo video! ?
