The iconic first level of Super Mario Bros has been recreated in augmented reality, on a huge scale.
Abhishek Singh built the game for Microsoft Hololens using game development platform Unity.
But taking it a step further, Abhishek dressed up as Mario and played the game in Central Park – much to the confusion of onlookers.
The 28-year-old was inspired to start the project when he began messing around with Hololens.
He said: “I 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 all the memories came rushing back.”
But the game was harder to build than Abhishek had expected.
“The entire experience was built in Unity. I also had to model all the assets and elements of the game and rethink the experience from a real world 3D perspective. It was much harder than I anticipated. The most time was probably spent on tweaking the game to work in a large outdoor setting, something the Hololens is not necessarily designed for.
“It still has a few quirks but is definitely playable. The final level was more than 110m long!” he said.
The video has already been viewed over 210,000 times on the NYU ITP graduate’s YouTube in just a few days, and Abhishek is considering building a few of the underground levels and doing them on the New York City Subway.
There is some bad news for the Mario fans out there hoping to play Super Mario in AR – this game, as cool as it is, probably won’t be available for download due to copyright issues.
“I’ll probably be sharing the code on GitHub or if people are in New York and want to try it, maybe that could be arranged,” Abhishek added.
