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Universal has announced its latest Jurassic World tie-in product: a Pokémon Go-style AR app called DinoTracker. Allows players to interact with dinos from the recently released lordship movie, and to pick up little facts about their real-life counterparts.
The premise of the app is quite simple: using their phone’s camera, players can “follow” tracks of dinos in the world around them. When they find the dinos – there are 10 prehistoric characters to be found – they can feed them with their hands. Developed by Trigger XR, the game uses Niantic’s Lightship ARDK to recognize different surfaces and spaces and map the appropriately sized dino to the space around the user.
GamesBeat spoke to Jason Yim, CEO of Trigger XR, about the app. He noted that the functions of the lightship allow the dinosaurs to interact with the environment in a way. “Normally AR always appears as a top layer, which breaks credibility. Now, with object occlusion, you can see a dino appear from behind a tree or hide behind objects in the sky. That adds a lot to the consumer feeling that it is really there.” Dinos can also follow users with their heads and become aggressive if they get too close.
This isn’t the first time a Jurassic World connection app has used AR technology to place dinos in the real world – 2018’s Jurassic World Alive launched roughly around the film’s release Fallen Kingdom. That game takes much more inspiration from Pokémon Go than Dinotracker.
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