First-person ‘Angry Birds’ AR Game is Coming to Magic Leap This Fall

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Angry Birds, the mobile breakout hit, is coming to Magic Leap in a brand new game called Angry Birds FPS: First Person Slingshot. Due to launch this Fall, the game is quite literally a first-person take on the physics-based slingshot smasher game.

Rovio Entertainment’s Angry Birds franchise is one of the smartphone world’s earliest smash-hits. The original game of the same name has more than 100 million installs on Android, according to the Google Play store. The entire franchise has achieved some four billion downloads, according to the company.

Now, in partnership with Resolution Games, Rovio is bringing Angry Birds FPS: First Person Slingshot to augmented reality on Magic Leap this fall. While the original mobile games give players a side-scrolling view as they launch birds from a slingshot in an effort to knock down wobbly forts, Angry Birds FPS will put the slingshot in players hands, allowing them to launch birds from a first-person view and walk around the opposing structure for the best vantage point.

The game is heading to the Magic Leap One headset this Fall, though an exact release date and price haven’t been announced.

Image courtesy Rovio, Resolution Games

This seems like a smart approach for a game on Magic Leap One, since the structures to be destroyed are naturally distant from the user, and understandably small, which hopefully means that field of view clipping won’t present much of an issue.

While Angry Birds has a distinct family-friendly allure, it’s doubtful that a demographic of younger kids will be playing Angry Birds FPS on Magic Leap’s $2,300 developer kit headset any time soon, though getting the franchise onto the platform could be a win in the long term, and a fun distraction for the developers experimenting with the headset today.

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This won’t actually be the first time that Angry Birds found itself experimenting in the VR/AR space. Way back in 2015 the company showed a glimpse of Angry Birds VR running on a Gear VR headset, though the title never saw a public release.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • eckehard

    Ja – so habe ich mir das vorgestellt – realer Raumblick und irgendwelche Shooter oder lesbare Desktop und Movie -Einspielungen – ist doch wohl besser als Karton Kino oder Karton-Game in den geschlossenen VR-Brillen (ich habe selber zwei Oculus) -oder wie oder was

  • Guygasm

    I’m really curious if something like this would attract casual users versus the same experience in Santa Cruz. Doesn’t seem like any environment interaction so AR only adds passively seeing your surroundings. $2,300 vs $500.

  • Firestorm185

    Interesting choice! I hope itll have some sort of level builder, it’d be very cool to make your own structures.

  • Doug Bowman

    My students knew this was a good idea five years ago: https://youtu.be/ZZZIqQbzbKA Glad to see a professional version of this!

  • NooYawker

    They should make a phone version.

  • MarquisDeSang

    AR is dead, it will never work unless they can mask pixels so they are not transparent. AR is only good at showing ghost.Not very useful.

  • jj

    so damn pointless. all that funding for what? flappy birds? thats just adding insult to injury for ML. Not to mentions the continuous over exaggeration of the actual experience is what pisses me off. The majority of the time you wont even be able to see all of the models, even when theyre only on the table due to the still small fov. Then they made the images look 100% opaque when they are not 100% opaque, more like ghost images.

  • Mateusz Pawluczuk

    This only makes sense if it’s multi and crosscompatible with smartphones. Otherwise, as others mentioned, it’s pretty pointless plus in VR you can shrink yourself and marvel at these structures, slingshot yourself etc all the stuff you can’t do in AR. But if you and your friends can share the same AR space and play Angry Birds together well then that’s a different story.

  • It’s great for visibility of the device, but angry birds has been a success for mobile because it exploited very well the new possibilities of touch screen. Beat saber is doing the same for VR. I doubt that the game is the optimal game for AR, even if it seems quite fun