Playing Augmented Reality Musical Chairs with the Avengers

Avengers: Endgame has the been the hottest movie of the past couple of weeks, and generated an astounding $357 million dollars at the opening weekend domestic box office. Since then, it has gone on to gross $2.3 billion dollars worldwide. That’s because it’s the culmination of more than a decade of story-building in the Marvel Universe. To celebrate the record-setting movie, Abhishek Singh has created an augmented reality game to play musical chairs with the Avengers.

This video game allows you to play musical chairs with the characters from Avengers in augmented reality. The game starts with four chairs, and a screen to select a set of characters from Avengers: Endgame. After selecting the characters to play with and starting the game, the music begins playing. As with a traditional game of musical chairs, the player runs around the chairs, and as soon as the music stops they have to sit down.

At the same time, the augmented reality characters will attempt to do the same. Lights on the chairs indicate to the player if a seat has already been taken by a character in augmented reality, and the player sitting down tells the game that a character can’t sit there. Whoever is left standing is turned to dust, and the remaining players proceed with the next round using one less chair.

Singh created the game using a combination of a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and an iPhone app built with ARKit and Unity. Most augmented reality games would run in just the app, but the interactivity of this game requires additional inputs and outputs to play. Those are the buttons on the chairs that detect if the player has sat down, and lights on the chairs to let the player know if one of the Avengers has sat down. That’s monitored by the Raspberry Pi, which runs a Node.js server and acts as wireless access point.

The iPhone app connects to that server, and uses the provided information to facilitate the gameplay. The final provision is a set of markers on the chairs, which indicate which side players can sit on. The iPhone app also takes those into account, so that the Avengers characters can only sit on the proper side of the chair. Singh’s work here is, frankly, ingenious, and the best possible way we can think of to play a game with your favorite superheroes.