iPhone Gunman an Unexpected Leap Forward in FPS Gaming

Now this is pretty damn cool.

Gunman for the iPhone is the world’s first augmented reality first person shooter. As you can see from the video above, it puts a crosshair on your iPhone and allows you to shoot and kill your friends. Though the game seems relatively rudimentary and simple, the tech behind it has pretty significant implications for the future of mobile gaming.

You set your friend’s shirt color as your target, so the game keeps track of when you actually hit him to get points. You reload your gun by shaking your phone, when you kill your friend their phone vibrates and soon, the game will come out with updates supporting geolocation, online leaderboards and weapon upgrades.

I predict if this app catches on, there will be a shit storm of controversy around it due to the fact that many people will believe that kids running around in real life pretending to kill each other with iPhones is one step beyond virtually killing each other with game controllers, and we’re now all on our way to becoming mass murderers.

Though this may seem like one step past Xbox, I think it’s actually a regression, despite the tech. It takes me back to the days of playing in my yard with NERF guns and Super Soakers, pretending to kill my friends with foam darts and water. And back then I was holding ACTUAL guns. Well, they were more like guns than an iPhone at least.

Extrapolating the applications of this kind of tech, we could see a new type of real-world/video game hybrid in the future. Imagine a plastic gun casing that could hold your iPhone, PSP or Nintendo DS with its crosshairs as a scope, and you could skulk around the city trying to kill each other. It’s like paintball meets Call of Duty, but the only danger would be accidentally being shot by cops who don’t know what’s going on.

I think this tech has the potential to change the future of gaming, but we’ll have to see in what way that manifests itself.

[via Geek]