For anyone who has ever loved Star Wars video games — or even just loved the Star Wars films — there’s really been only one dream: to experience Star Wars as if you were in it. As if it was real. To hold a lightsaber in your hands and battle Darth Vader, standing before you. Or even to play the monster-filled holographic game from Star Wars: A New Hope — the one that we learn inspires Chewbacca to pull droids’ arms out of their sockets.
With Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, we’re a step closer to that dream.
Available now for $199.99, Jedi Challenges from Lenovo and Disney is a smartphone-powered augmented reality experience and a wonder to play. Included out of the box are a headset, lightsaber controller, and tracking beacon. Download the official app, put your phone in the headset, turn on the tracking beacon (which tells the app where your floor is, literally grounding the visuals), grab your Jedi weapon, and you’re off.
StarWars.com got to try out Jedi Challenges‘ three games — lightsaber battles, holochess, and strategic combat — and found them intuitive, visually impressive, and completely smile-inducing. Read about the results below.
“We started off thinking less about platforms and [more about] how could we deliver the best lightsaber experience,” Mike Goslin, VP, Advanced Development at Disney, tells StarWars.com. “We very quickly came to augmented reality as the best way to do lightsabers.” But for the developers, figuring out the best way to put fans into a believable lightsaber duel was only the first problem solved. Actually pulling it off would be the real challenge.
Motion-controlled sword fighting, in general, has proven historically difficult in video games. There’s no one pushing back against you. In a first-person view, there’s the cognitive realization that your opponent is on your TV screen. AR would eliminate the TV screen hurdle, but this would still require lots of design trickery and expertise for Jedi Challenges: How will the player know when to stop their strike? How will they know they’ve been hit? How close or how far should the opponent be? How long should the sword be? Will it register that they’ve struck their opponent’s weapon or body?
“We knew it was going to be really compelling to have a life-size character right up in your personal space,” Goslin says. “That’s really intense and dramatic. We knew we could do that. But we didn’t know we could actually do sword fighting, because it’s a really specific thing. And without making contact, does it even feel right? So we spent a lot of time, I’m embarrassed to say, out in the quad here with pool noodles, working out ‘What are you going to want to feel like when you’re dueling?’ We spent a lot of time making the A.I. good, but not too good. We found out pretty early on if you get everything to line up — if you have a little bit of a haptic feedback in your hilt, and the visual is telling you that you’ve contacted something, and the character that you’re battling reacts appropriately, and the audio supports that — you start to buy into it.”
The resulting lightsaber battles, StarWars.com is excited to say, feel authentic and surprisingly intense. When a holographic opponent — first Darth Maul, then Darth Vader, followed by Kylo Ren, and then maybe someone else — inches closer, you’ll find yourself going into a combat stance and stepping back. You know when you’ve clashed lightsabers. You know where to block thanks to some smart visual cues. Landing a hit is satisfying and energizing. In all, it’s a powerful illusion. And it bears mentioning that the controller itself is beautifully designed, with a rubber grip, chrome finish, and even a belt clip — nicely adding to the experience. Adventure? Excitement? Sometimes a Jedi craves these things.
“We’re really happy with how that came out,” says Goslin. “It came out as we hoped it would. Both in terms of the initial experience of turning on your lightsaber and waving it around in front of you, but also the depth. It’s quite deep. Battling the harder opponents is really hard and it takes a lot of practice, and you’ve got to earn some Force abilities. So we’re really happy with how that turned out.”
Not to be left out are holochess — Jedi Challenges‘ version of dejarik, the aforementioned game seen in A New Hope in which you’d be advised to “Let the Wookiee win” — and strategic combat. They are far from afterthoughts, both featuring the same graphical quality and attention to detail as the lightsaber battles. Holochess is a true, rule-based game, and yes, you can have your creatures body slam your opponents’. The strategic combat game, in which you command the forces of the Rebellion, Republic, or Resistance in a tower-defense clash with the Empire, Separatists, or First Order, requires that you experiment, learn from your mistakes, and develop a sense of military know-how. Victories are rewarding, and the experience itself benefits from the AR presentation and motion-controls: want to move that gun turret? Just pick it up and drop it where you want on the 3D playfield before you.
With all of the experiences taken together, there’s never been a Star Wars release quite like Jedi Challenges.
“We wanted to make this for all Star Wars fans,” says Goslin. “What I’m most excited about in the future is, man, there’s almost no limit to what you can do with this kind of technology. And it’s going to allow us all to live those moments that we’ve dreamed about from our favorite films and stories. We can live them out ourselves in our own homes. I think that’s just a fantastic way to tell stories and create experiences that people haven’t been able to do before.”
Bought the Jedi Challenges VR which was £50 on Amazon, so something of a steal.
It's super fun, though my phone is technically not compatible on the list (Samsung J6) and I think that's affecting some capability (I have to turn my head away to dodge instead of leaning, and O cannot get the non lightsaber based games to work) but it's so much fun pinging blaster bolts back at enemies and duelling darksiders. It's a shame that the lightsaber is the sole control, would have been fun to be able to actually force push, but you can still push your hand out and pretend.
Pros - Glowstick go voom
Cons - Accidentally stepped on my cat due to lack of peripheral vision
The Dark Side Expansion arrives today for the Lenovo and Disney augmented-reality experience, Star Wars: Jedi Challenges. A free update to the mobile app, the Dark Side Expansion places players inside the virtual boots of Kylo Ren, where they’ll wield the game’s beautiful and undeniably-cool lightsaber controller and duel Star Wars legends like Yoda and Rey.
Having players step into the role of Kylo Ren serves another purpose, as well. It allows gamers to be a Star Wars villain without having to journey down the dark path themselves, which was important to the developers. “We were going around and around on ways to solve that, and eventually the solve we came up with was, ‘What if you just are Kylo?” says Douglas Boethling, assistant producer on Jedi Challenges and member of the Lucasfilm Games Team. “You are taking on the persona of Kylo and you’re acting out the Kylo fantasy. That gives it that layer of separation, where you are playing that role.”
Indeed, the team took special care to get character-through-action just right, collaborating closely with Lucasfilm to bring the update’s Jedi to life.
“Looking at something on a screen, it’s much more forgiving with animation than it is when a character is standing right in front of you,” Hunt says. “One of the things we wanted to do was to make sure that the motions were as accurate as possible, without using mo-cap at all. To be as responsive as possible to the player.”
To do so, they went to some surprising sources. Beyond reference material like photography or studying the movies themselves, the developers looked, essentially, at the making of Star Wars lightsaber duels. “We get a lot of footage, and not just what’s seen in the films,” Hunt says. “We’re able to get a lot of access to footage of the actors and actresses when they’re going through training and behind the scenes. That’s really, really helpful, to see what the intention behind the motion is, and not just the final product based on what the director may have wanted you to see in that particular spot. Being able to see an entire sequence of how a fight scene has played out before the final edits and cuts are put in, you can really start to break down how a person moves.”
Inilah Deretan Inovasi Teranyar Lenovo di Tech Life - IFA 2018
Inilah Deretan Inovasi Teranyar Lenovo di IFA 2018
Seperti halnya raksasa teknologi lainnya, Lenovo menggelar hajatan di sela IFA 2018 di Berlin, Jerman. Dalam acara Lenovo Tech Life – IFA 2018, Lenovo komplit mengumumkan rangkaian produk terbarunya sebagai bagian dari strategi transformasi intelijen teknologi.
Dalam Lenovo Tech Life 2018, produsen ini menghadirkan inovasi yang mencakup perangkat rumah cerdas, laptop hingga augmented realityagar…
