Mixed Reality, Augmented Reality, whatever you like to call it (and it seems to change every week. In a way its kind of shocking how fast 'immersive technology' is spreading. Especially considering how few people over the age of 40 seem to be aware that its not a 'future' technology.
Despite the massive gearing up across the entertainment industry for both Virtual and Mixed Reality, the people who follow entertainment news and gossip might as well be thinking about the multiverse. Interesting but probably not applicable in their lifetimes.
Lost in Time by The Future Group is evidence that it will be. For the first time in history, this TV show will be using mixed reality as part of the interactive television format.
8 episodes of Lost in Time will feature contestants competing in six different virtual worlds: Ice Age, Wild West, Roaring 20s, Jurassic Era, Medieval, and the Space Age. In each of these worlds, players will face four primary game challenges.
The gameshow combines the virtual worlds with physical props that presage the kind of entertainment centers being developed for mall concepts elsewhere. The physical objects are linked to mixed reality actions that have real effects in the virtual worlds. Its pretty awesome (in the old sense of that word).
Mixed Reality Development
Recently, Bard Anders Kasin (the founder of The Future Group) elaborated on the project to Gamecrate,
“Where to start? We are working on a social entertainment platform. At the center of this platform is a technology we call interactive mixed reality, which is a new type of mixed-reality technology, which allows us to merge real and virtual worlds into one. It’s basically integrating virtual TV studio technology on one side with games technology and mobile technology.
And it allows us to create some all-new experiences like the first show we’ve done, together with FreemantleMedia, which is called Lost in Time, which is the first show to utilize the platform. It allows us to take contestants and place them into virtual worlds on TV, where they can compete in basically anything. Where game shows were previously limited to pretty basic things like throwing balls and climbing walls and things like that, now suddenly you can travel to the middle ages and shoot down dragons. Or you’d be able to travel to Star Wars and fly on spaceships. That’s not something we’re doing with Lost in Time, that’s just a hypothetical example.
What’s unique is that we’re also placing those at home into the same virtual environment. They’re actually able to participate in exactly the same story as those on TV, and compete against those on TV.”
Naturally, there is an App.
Because obviously.
In this case thats pretty cool, because The Future Group has ported the Lost in Time mixed reality challenges onto theirs
This will allow viewers (and anyone else with the gear) to play these games at home as well.
They seem to be following Sansar's lead on their development and rollout. (virtual currencies and all)
“We’ve also added meta-features to ensure user retention, so that people also play throughout the week, and earn virtual currencies in order to participate in the biggest tournaments with the bigger physical prizes when the show is live,” said The Future Group Game’s Director Ellen Lyse Einarson. “A player at home will be chosen to win the same money reward that one of the contestants takes away, so it’s obviously in their benefit that the contestants do really well.”
The Future Group is based out of Norway but working to take the concept worldwide.