Big Blue Ceiling

The Town

Spatial tabletop gameplay with an extended reality interface.

Eddie OffermannConcept and development

Role
Concept and development
Areas
XR, Apps, Computer Vision
A tablet screen showing a cartoon windmill with a purple roof and a cottage on a grassy tabletop board divided by red grid lines.

The Town, which we also call TangoTown, is spatial gameplay built for Google Tango. We created the first build at a Google Tango developers workshop in San Francisco, then kept going with it.

It grew into tabletop-style gameplay: a little town laid out on a grid in your space, built up and played through a distinctive extended reality interface. Beyond Tango devices, it also runs on Android and iOS phones without Tango's sensors.

Part of our mobile XR R&D.

  • Play video: The Town
    Tabletop-style gameplay on a phone, with buildings placed on a grid in the room.
  • A miniature virtual town of rooftops and streets rendered over a real floor on a tablet
    The town placed in the room
  • Close view of the virtual town rooftops anchored to a real surface
  • The virtual town terrain conforming to the scanned room
  • The town sitting on a wireframe mesh of the scanned room
    The room is remeshed into a grid the game is built on
  • A grid mesh generated from a depth scan of a room
    Room scan turned into a play grid
  • A traffic cone on the floor marking a corner of the play space
    Four traffic cones mark out the play space
  • A tablet held up showing the town overlaid on the room
  • Walkaround on the tablet

Sources

  • AR Scuba

    An underwater 360 video performed as a hologram.

    • XR
    • Apps
    • Computer Vision

  • Augmented Clothing

    Clothing as a platform for augmented reality, starting with hats.

    • XR
    • Apps
    • Computer Vision

  • Cardforia and SecureVR

    Unity building blocks for phone-based AR and VR.

    • XR
    • Tools
    • Apps
    • Computer Vision

  • iOS LiDAR Scanner

    3D scanning and surface reconstruction on LiDAR-equipped iPhones and iPads.

    • XR
    • Computer Vision
    • Apps
    • VFX