Ghostwire lets Gamers use their Sixth Sense

Apparently, the new Ghostbusters video game isn’t enough ghosts for gamers, as Swedish developer A Different Game announced a new kind of ghost game with Ghostwire.

The game is an augmented reality game designed for the Nintendo DSi. For those of you who are not familiar with augmented reality, you should know this: do not use the terms augmented reality and virtual reality interchangeably.

According to Search CIO, Virtual reality is an artificial environment that is created with software and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment. Augmented Reality is a type of virtual reality that aims togenerate a composite view for the user that is the combination of the real scene viewed by the user and a virtual scene generated by the computer that augments the scene with additional information. (Definition obtained from Webopedia.)

When I was at CES last January, I saw a demonstration of Augmented Reality from a company called Total Immersion. A TI representative took a K’nex box and waved it front of the webcam. The image on the screen was the box, but a digital effect of the assembled K’nex model floating above it. Special sensors within the box allowed the image to be manipulated in 3-D space by simply moving the box. It was easily the coolest thing that I found at CES.

The augmented reality program in Ghostwire allows a player to use their DSi camera to look a around a room for ghosts. Think of it as a portal to the astral plane to find and collect ghosts that exist all around. The game will even use the microphone so you can hear them. From there, the gamer uses the touchscreen to figure out why the ghost is haunting the world.

Many of my sources compare this game to Ghost Hunters, that SCI-FI channel show which gets as much flack as Crossing Over did a few years ago.

However, I think a better comparison would be made to the hit M. Night Shyamalan flim The Sixth Sense. It’s hard to believe that the I see dead people film is a decade old this year, but if the studio had ever wanted to make a television series out of this now-classic movie, then it would be a lot like Ghostwire.

Man, I’m really surprised that those crazy TV network execs didn’t ever try something like that. I mean, they made My Big Fat Greek Life for crying out loud. I personally would have enjoyed a series about a little kid who has to figure out what the ghosts in his life want. Of course, they already have Medium and Ghost Whisperer.

Those shows are pretty popular, so why not create a game where the player can interact with the citizens of the hereafter from a first-person point-of-view?

Ghostwire seems to be one of several games that have been coming out that involve much interactivity on the gamer’s part, but usually involve some sort of accessory. In the case of Ghostwire, the DSi allows the use of augmented reality brings the player into the game, which should be the goal of the entire video game industry for the future.

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