Yes, you can pretend to be Konata, but we aren’t talking about that kind of pretend. This is about the games of pretend you played as a kid, when the colored squares in the floor were lava and you’d die if you stepped on them. And also the kind you play today, even when you’d never admit it, like when you sit at your desk and pretend to be working for 8 hours a day.

We’re kidding on that last one, but Russell Davies takes pretend very seriously and he thinks it should become a bigger part of gaming in the future. He gave a presentation at London’s Playful event on the place pretending takes on our lives and how utterly magical it can be when we use it for gaming. This is augmented reality like you haven’t seen it before. The full presentation transcript, along with the slides and videos are on his site it its a must read. It’s smart, funny and very insightful. If you care for the deeper meanings of gaming or augmented reality you’d do yourself a favor by reading it.

[Russell Davies / Via Wonderland]

ARhrrrr is a new Augmented Reality game design project from Georgia Tech and Savannah College of Art and Design. It runs on the Tegra, a new handheld by nVidia that claims to support ‘high end’ 3d graphics. Now, I didn’t know high end meant N64 era graphics, but the augmented reality portion of the game seems ingenious enough.

You play on a small 3D city simulating a helicopter ride, then you take out zombies that try and eat the few remaining survivors. That seems simple enough until you integrate skittles, yes, not only can you taste the rainbow, you can apparently also use it to kill the undead. The integration of everyday objects may not yet be Frantz Lasorne’s vision of augmented reality but its still inspiring. AR games come a step closer to the mainstream with ARhrrrr.

Now here’s my question. Why did nVidia have to make a silly bulky handheld for anyone to give this a try when we’ve got the Nintendo DSi which not only has one but two cameras? Is the DSi not powerful enough for those high end graphics?

[ARhrrrr  / Via Offworld]