As you may well know, Sony’s God of War series helped shape the company’s work in VR, and now it’s doing the same for AR too.
The god-slaying series makes its long-awaited return on PS4 this week with the launch of the rebooted God of War. Sadly there’s no PlayStation VR (PSVR) support to speak of, but Sony has launched God of War: Mimir’s Vision on both iOS and Android. This tie-in app uses ARKit and ARCore respectively to showcase the world of the new PS4 exclusive.
All you need to do is download the free app and then find a flat surface for your phone’s camera to camera to read. Then you can tap the screen and your phone will project the land of Midgard (or rather, Earth) into the real world. You can physically move your phone to study the landscape, which series protagonist Kratos and his young son, Atreus, will journey across in the game.
By tapping one part of the screen certain points of interest will appear on the map. You can zoom into these and select them to learn the land’s lore directly from the Norse god Mimir, who we can only guess will have the misfortune of meeting Kratos during the game.
It’s definitely interesting to see Sony leveraging AR to promote PlayStation games, especially via third-party solutions, though the company has done the same using PSVR in the past (and the wider Sony Corp has utilized all major VR headsets to promote its movies like Spider-Man: Homecoming). Does this mean we can expect to see PlayStation make bigger moves in the AR space in the coming years?
