Google has announced an upcoming AR game, Space Invaders: World Defense, which is built as a showcase of the company’s latest AR tool.

Over the last few years Google has been steadily working on its AR developer toolset, ARCore. This week at Google IO 2023, the company added a brand new tool to its kit called Geospatial Creator.

Geospatial Creator gives developers the ability to create world-anchored digital content that will appear in the same location for all users. Built on a foundation of both ARCore and 3D data from Google Maps, it’s competes with Niantic’s Lightship AR platform, and is getting integrations for both Unity and Adobe Aero.

To showcase the latest capabilities of ARCore, Google has teamed up with Taito Corporation, the original developer of arcade hit Space Invaders (1978), to build a brand new city-scale AR game called Space Invaders: World Defense.

Planned to launch later this Summer—fittingly aligned with the 45 year anniversary of the original game—Space Invaders: World Defense will purportedly have players “defend the earth from Space Invaders in their neighborhood,” and will “combine AR and 3D gameplay to deliver a fully contextual and highly engaging immersive experience that connects multi-generations of players.”

Sadly we’ve yet to see a glimpse of any real gameplay, so it isn’t clear just how the game will work, but with any luck we’ll eventually find more information from the game’s official website.

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  • another juan

    it seems like google is slowly amassing a decent collection of AR content, ready for whenever they decide to release their XR glasses

  • Ender772

    i dont get it…what is it? doenst look like space invaders to me

  • Octogod

    Nothing like a completely faked trailer to sell me on your absolutely real tech launching in months.

    • Jonathan Winters III

      +1

  • I bet the game will be lame, but I’m more interested in the SDKs they are preparing for geolocalized AR experiences. Those look cool

  • REALLY neat! But… what hardware will this run on? Magic Leap? Hololens? (gag) It’ll probably be a release title for that Apple trash.

    Gameplay wise, I think it might fall hard on “gimmick”. I love a good gimmick, but you don’t want to go playing this in public. You’d die!