Minecraft Earth for iOS and Android goes beyond Pokémon Go

Alex Kipman, creator of HoloLens and Kinect at Microsoft, is still excited about the future of computing. As he stands before me inside of a MinecraftThemed conference room on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, I'm immediately drawn to the stacks of Lego blocks on the table next to it. Lego is the perfect analogy for Minecraft. For years, it's a game that millions of people use to create their own creations from blocks of virtual materials. Minecraft employees use Lego blocks to build miniature buildings at meetings, but in the last 12 months they have ventured outside to secretly test a new way of playing. Minecraft.

In the same building where Microsoft creates the next Halo game, a team of engineers and game designers have imagined the future of Minecraft on mobile phones with the help of HoloLens team. Minecraft Land is a new free game for iOS and Android surprisingly ambitious for Microsoft. We have already seen holograms with Microsoft's HoloLens headset, but the company now wants to bring this technology to a much larger scale with the help of Minecraft Land.

Pokemon Go In 2016, 20 million people in search of pokemon on the streets of the world, thanks to augmented reality. Minecraft has 91 million active players and Microsoft now wants to take the Pokemon Go concept a big step forward leaving Minecraft Players create and share what they have done in the game with friends in the real world, away from screens and TV screens.

"Minecraft Land proposes to completely break the dogma that has lived with us in the computer since the beginning: this idea of ​​a single person with a single device to create a single experience, "says Kipman. "With Minecraft Land, this is no longer the case. The content is in the real world. "

Imagine yourself at home and build something Minecraft on your phone, then drop it in your local park so that all your friends can see it together in one place. Minecraft Land aims to transform the AR game of individual experiences into a living and breathing virtual world, shared by all. If Microsoft succeeds, you will be able to enter a mall and point the camera from your phone to a McDonald's. Minecraft experience the adventure while eating a Big Mac or see your own giant structures next to real buildings.

This extremely ambitious project begins with some basics in the form of Minecraft Land. The game will be available in beta on iOS and Android this summer, and I was able to try various forms on the Microsoft campus two weeks ago. It is fair to say that the game I played was basic, sometimes buggy, but very impressive. While the regular version of Minecraft allows players to play in modes such as creation (with blocks and unlimited objects) or survival (if you die, you lose your items), Microsoft combines these traditional modes to a new way of playing Minecraft.

"It's an adaptation, it's not a direct translation of Minecraft, Explains Torfi Olafsson, director of the game at Minecraft Land. Although it is an adaptation, it is built on the existing Bedrock engine, so it will be very familiar with Minecraft players. "If you like building Redstone machines, or if you're used to the flow of water or the falling of the sand, everything works," said Olafsson. All mobs of animals and creatures in Minecraft are also available, including a new pig that really loves mud. "We tried to stay very faithful to the type of pillars of the design MinecraftWe also worked with the Stockholm design team to ensure that the spirit of the game materializes, "says Olafsson.

Just like Pokemon Goyou will have to venture into the real world to collect objects. Instead of pokéstops, Minecraft Land has "tapables" that are randomly placed in the world around you. There are always two nearby and you can walk to get more. These are designed to give you small rewards allowing you to build objects. You will want to collect as much as possible to obtain resources and objects to build large structures in construction mode.

"We have covered the entire planet in MinecraftOlafsson explains. "Every lake is a fishing spot, every park is a place where you can fell trees. We actually took maps from around the world and converted them to Minecraft."

These maps, based on OpenStreetMap, allowed Microsoft to begin to determine where to place Minecraft adventures in the world. These adventures appear dynamically on the Minecraft Land card and are designed for multiple people to get involved. It's really where Minecraft Land starts to get interesting and beyond all that I've played in other AR games like Pokemon Go. I have tried various adventures during my brief Minecraft Land demo game, and they go from peaceful and friendly to a little more risky, knowing that you enter them and risk losing all your treasure if you die to a monster.

The fascinating part of the adventure is that you can be side by side with friends, all playing the same game at the same place on a sidewalk or in a park at the same time. Microsoft uses an awesome computer magic behind the scenes (we'll talk about it later) so that when you play an adventure, it's in a specific location, beyond the usual GPS coordinates, so that everyone can live the same. same thing. You can fight monsters, break up structures for resources together and even stand in front of a friend to prevent them from physically killing a virtual sheep.

All blocks collected during an adventure are shared with other players. There are no player-versus-player battles here to kill and steal equipment. You will even see the tools that other players have in their hands on the screen of your phone, next to their username. The idea is that you essentially become your phone Minecraft Land, and your camera is a goal in this virtual world.

Once you have gathered a lot of resources, you can start building. Each player will have a library of building plates, some of which will reach 200 x 200 feet. You can use building plates to sit a Minecraft build on a table and build something with friends. Each piece of material used by a friend on your own plate will then be part of your construction. It is therefore a collaborative effort to create giant structures; playing solo will mean a lot of material search.

I sat for about 10 minutes to create a Minecraft build where I could see blocks flying on someone's structure next to me. They could also see everything I was doing in real time and we could build together, block by block. If I wanted to, I could also fly my friends' blocks here to create my own mega building. This introduces an interesting social dynamic because, unlike most games, you will be physically next to the person you are flying into the virtual world. "To fly, you have to watch and go," Hmm, I'll take your blocks, "says Saxs Persson, creative director of Minecraft. "The shenanigans will come when people have different opinions about what needs to happen, or when they come together and do something meaningful."

Once you have completed a build, you can then share a link to it so that your friends or followers can play with your creation on a table or on a giant scale in an open space. You will only be able to share a temporary copy of your version with your friends. They can burn it and slaughter your animals, but they will not be saved. Because every block, every animal and every object came from somewhere, it's a chance for Minecraft Land players to show how many hours they spent in the game. "It allows people to create something nice and share it with their friends," says Olafsson. "It allows you to be inspired by other people's know-how."

There is also a progression in Minecraft Land with levels and experience points that resemble a traditional RPG rather than the classic game Minecraft experience. Your character never resets and you always have the same materials in a world in which everyone participates. "We think it's important to reward and recognize your progress," said Olafsson. "We have levels that unlock content, and as you progress, you'll have access to more and more content and building plates." You will also start to earn rupee, the motto of the game for Minecraft Land this will allow you to buy things like build plates, potions and more content.

One of the key elements of Minecraft Land is to have multiple people interact with adventures in a specific place in real time. This is a very difficult problem to solve with augmented reality, and it is thanks to recent advances in mobile technology that have allowed Microsoft to even try to tackle it. Ultimately, Microsoft wants them to persist as "holograms" in the environment around us with exact precision. The problem is that our phone cameras are not very smart. You can use GPS, Wi-Fi fingerprints and AR to determine a location, but you need computer vision algorithms to really determine where to place a virtual object with which everyone is going interact.

Microsoft uses its new Azure Spatial Anchors technology for Minecraft Land. It uses artificial vision algorithms so that real-world objects can be used to anchor digital content. These holograms, as Microsoft calls them, always stay in one place. Apple and Google are also looking for ways to allow multiple devices to see and interact with the same virtual object in AR, but Microsoft is trying to create the infrastructure and tools for developers to use on iOS and Android. This is the secret sauce of Minecraft Land, If you want.

"We rely on the people who come out and basically do not scan the world, but let's see the world for us and then create that common play space," says Persson. It means that Minecraft Land players will help inform where the adventures should be placed. They will also help strengthen Microsoft's Microsoft Azure Spatial Anchors technology by simply pointing their cameras to the environment around them. There are obviously privacy implications here, and Microsoft says that all data and images will be anonymized so that the algorithms only detect feature points around you. Without this artificial vision, Microsoft could not be as ambitious with Minecraft Land.

"To do this, we had to use some of the HoloLens algorithms to capture images on a device and turn them into a cloud of points that we can share," says Jason Cahill, engineering architect for Minecraft. This allows Microsoft to locate all players in the game and know exactly where they are and where to place an adventure that anyone can interact with. The adventures will start cautiously, and players will head to the difficult area where Microsoft has designated a place to play. These will be mainly placed nearby, where people often pick up the tapables, and it will be up to the first players in this area to decide exactly where an adventure will be placed. Once it has been placed enough times in a secure area, new players will simply continue to walk and start interacting with the adventure.

Microsoft is also very careful about the location of these adventures. Pokemon Go The Niantic developer recently had to take legal action against angry homeowners who had installed pokéstops near their home. Many challenges arise with respect to the association of augmented reality with private spaces. "It's about Microsoft, we have an army of people working to create a good place to play," says Persson. And how to help people who say, "No, it's not for me. I do not want it at home or in my shop. "

Persistent holograms are obviously the ultimate goal of Minecraft Landand it's easy to imagine a future where players can drop them where they want once they're approved. This user generated content always has a mountain of risks. Whether it's people building virtual penises or swastika houses, there will always be people who would like to spoil the fun.

"User-generated content raises many very real challenges," says Persson. "It's a complex problem at the scale we're talking about, but that does not mean we should not be dealing with it." Microsoft begins with a cautious start without user-generated content being freely placed in the world and then he plans to find out how to get that content in Minecraft Land In the future. "Our vision is that over time, collection, building, games and adventures will lead to things that people demand, they have a place to exhibit," says Persson. "I think we have definitely taken the right steps to start this trip. And then we'll see how quickly we can find the right way for more people to see what you're doing. "

There are clearly many challenges to Minecraft Land work perfectly, and Microsoft is certainly ambitious here. From the demonstrations I've done, there is a lot of potential for this to become a real killer AR app. It's different from anything I've seen in RA before, but sometimes the demos felt a bit chaotic with many people involved in adventures and building structures. I think the basic game loops will work well with a few people side by side, but it will have 20, 50 or even hundreds of people interacting with a holographic player. Minecraft the adventure will be very difficult.

This challenge will fuel Microsoft's broader ambitions with HoloLens and augmented reality in general. Microsoft sees devices like HoloLens as the "third wave of computing," but the company needs the mobile scale to truly understand the world and improve HoloLens and its own cloud offerings. I think Minecraft Land is essential to improve Azure Spatial Anchors, HoloLens and most of Microsoft's cloud offerings. The lessons learned from this game could ultimately help improve the services, software, and even hardware that Microsoft offers business customers.

"I think the partnership will improve our overall product," said Neena Kamath, Product Manager at Azure Mixed Reality at Microsoft. "We discover so much … to understand how users interact with their world and what their design points are. It's an excellent partnership. Microsoft has used the research and technology it has built for HoloLens and has now integrated it into iOS and Android devices with the help of Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore. Now the real world data of those devices that everyone has in their pockets will be returned. "It's a beautiful loop," says Kamath. Minecraft Land will not be launched soon on HoloLens, although Microsoft teased it at E3 a few years ago.

Microsoft is now planning to let Minecraft player access Minecraft Land for a closed beta this summer. It is unclear how many will access the beta or if it will be limited to the US initially. It's early for Minecraft LandMicrosoft still does not have all the answers to its questions. Even monetization is not finalized. "We are lucky that Minecraft in itself is doing well from a financial point of view, which allows us not to focus too much on what is happening with Minecraft LandSays Matt Booty, head of Xbox gaming studios. "I am totally confident that the team will determine what is the right monetization for the game."

I've spotted a market section in Minecraft Landbut it was not ready or filled, so monetization is a work in progress. Microsoft has, however, hinted that building plates could be sold, and it's easy to imagine that you can buy a bunch of rupees to get more equipment. Of course, Microsoft says that, of course, he will not use surprise boxes.

It is also reasonable to assume that we could even see Microsoft appear on stage at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) next month. While Microsoft promises to support Android and iOS, I only experienced the game on the latest Apple iPhone XS handsets during my short period of practice. Minecraft Land It's the best augmented reality demonstration on an iPhone I've ever seen, and Apple introduced the Lego structures when demonstrating multiplayer mode last year.

For now, all we have are demos and Microsoft does not allow me to take photos or videos, nor to play. The company is particularly hesitant, probably because the first versions of the game are a bit buggy. In addition to the summer beta, the company does not commit to a full launch date or Minecraft Land. I think that's largely because Minecraft The team still has a lot of technology and design decisions to make.

Microsoft game manager Phil Spencer was the first to experiment with the original prototype last April. Persson revealed that the couple was delighted to launch fireworks in Minecraft Land at lunch time, outside, in the rain, while colleagues walked unaware of the future that Microsoft is building. Microsoft now has months of work ahead to get Minecraft Land ready. Like the millions of people who play Minecraft At the moment, Microsoft still has a lot to do to integrate holograms into the real world.