29 ms·

New Game: Minecraft Earth

441 points by eDameXxX 7y ago

Causality1 7y ago
Dicks, dicks everywhere.
skohan 7y ago
This reminds me of when I first discovered Minecraft in university. I was just going to play for a couple hours before bed, and I got sucked into the game-loop and before I knew it the sun was coming up. A few days later, I was walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to wait at between my house and campus, and just for a moment looked at those tracks and I seriously thought about where I should place the Minecraft blocks to build a bridge and avoid waiting for the train. I decided to take a long break from Minecraft after that.
- retube 7y ago
  My kids are obsessed. Literally everything they say to me starts with "Daddy, on minecraft, ...." It's all they talk about, including with each other. They even act it out in playtime. Although as someone who has never played I basically understand nothing they are telling me. It seems pretty creative tho, and they seem to be learning a lot from it, so not too bothered. That said they are limited to 1 hour per sat and sun.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Sounds like a good time for a valuable life lesson about gauging counterparty interest in the topic at hand. Which so many people in the CS program at uni could have used. shudders, remembering a 20 minute "conversation" about DnD crossbow rules I somehow ended up in
    - spongo 7y ago
      (not the gp) I agree with you, ethbro, it is a valuable life lesson. I can personally attribute most of my social successes to the ability to gauge the interlocutor and their interests, and such a skill will gain one a rep as a good listener.
      - ethbro 7y ago
        Not in reference to the aforementioned children, because that's normal behavior for kids, but I think of active listening as not being a conversational sociopath. I'm convinced some people instead have a mantra of "When do I get to talk again?" looping in their head whenever someone else is speaking.
        derefr 7y ago
        On the other hand, I feel like some people have internalized this idea a bit too well, and apply it in places it doesn’t belong, becoming offended (for social-norm-violation reasons) when someone gives a tangential reply in a threaded comment system like HN’s or Reddit’s, because the tangent is “derailing the conversation” or “not addressing the topic.” Except, of course, that’s impossible; a tangential reply likely won’t even be the first reply people see in the sub-thread, after they get re-sorted by vote, so the only people who will engage with it are the people who never cared about the original topic in the first place.
    - vlunkr 7y ago
      Eh, sounds like these are young kids. It's more important to let them be excited about something and share that with you. Besides, what shared interests do you really have as a parent? It's not like your kids are going to discuss politics or their critique of Avengers: Endgame.
  - saddestcatever 7y ago
    Minecraft is one of the few games that I think everyone should try. It's not just "another video game", but something quite unique. It hits a certain part of the brain in both "creative expression" and "exploring the unknown" that we exercise so rarely in day to day life (or in other games). It's no wonder it really sticks with kids and becomes a way for them to express imagination. Make sure you sit down and try playing with them at some point, it'll be a fun learning experience for everyone involved.
    - jsilence 7y ago
      What would be a sensible minimum age for minecraft?
      - tVoss42 7y ago
        As soon as they can use a mouse and keyboard or controller. Seriously though, there's no mature themes in it at all, and if the gameplay is too difficult there's always creative mode which is literally digital legos. There's also a multiplayer where they can connect to servers and play with other people. That's where you might want to use some discretion, as the experience will vary from server to server.
      - sandworm101 7y ago
        Solo modes: whenever they can manipulate the interface. Online/shared server modes: when they understand the evils of the internet well enough to be safe. Setup and admin a server yourself. Watch how they play. Dont let it get too big. A dozen or two per server. Dont let them play with thousands of total strangers. That always ends in tears.
        retube 7y ago
        Can a server be hosted at home, or does it need to be on a proper hosting platform? Windows or linux?
        allannienhuis 7y ago
  - simonh 7y ago
    Mine got into it aged 8 and 9 and at least one of them still plays occasionally. She's 14 now. No regrets, it’s been good for them. It’s 21st century Lego. They create homes and worlds and share them with their friends, play competitive building games online, play team games of all sorts. It seems like a great online play space with a strong creative streak in it. I think it's a much better use of their time than watching cartoons. Although I did get my girls into Sailor Moon and the modern run of My Little Pony. I'm a strong believer in giving kids a grounding in the Classics.
    - voidmain0001 7y ago
      "...a grounding in the Classics." Thanks, that made me laugh!
    - toyg 7y ago
      The classics for me were Urusei Yatsura, Lupin III, Captain Tsubasa, Mirai Shōnen Conan, Goldrake/Grendizer... man, I feel old.
- beeandapenguin 7y ago
  Sounds like you caught a drift of the Tetris Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
  - hirundo 7y ago
    When I was playing Assassin's Creed I kept analyzing buildings for the best way to parkour to the top. Now I'm playing Stardew Valley and every vacant space looks like a good spot to plant strawberries.
    - gbrown 7y ago
      The difference is that empty spaces really are a good place to plant strawberries.
    - Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
      I always get these weird experiences when I've been really into playing some game, and then happen to half wake up in the middle of the night. I'll be in this bizarre half-awake, half-asleep state where I'm quasi-dreaming that I'm living in the game world and I won't be able to get the dream/hallucination to stop. Right now I'm getting seriously into Factorio, and I had this experience a few nights ago. I half-woke up and kept having these thought-hallucinations about the best method to use to optimize the way my resource refiners were feeding into my main bus, because I needed to make X% more sleep-cogs in order to go back to sleep. It's actually kind of infuriating when it happens, sometimes it keeps me in that half-awake state for as long as thirty minutes. Been happening to me since I was a kid.
    - zachberger 7y ago
      I have the same thing but with Breath of the Wild. I want to climb buildings and hang glide across the city.
- usaphp 7y ago
  It happens to me with Google, When I lose something at home the first thing I think about is how do I google where to find it
- wingerlang 7y ago
  The first time I played it (infdev or indev) I think I played it nonstop for 24h+, then I basically never played it again. As for the "seeing blocks". I had a period where I played some form of match-3 game, and while walking around I couldn't stop imagining arranging people walking into threes.
- jasonmp85 7y ago
  I mean, this is better than the time I stayed up all night playing GTA San Andreas in a friend's dorm room during college and while drowsily stumbling home felt an intense need to flee when I heard police sirens approaching.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    I was relieved when that story didn't end with you taking your money back from a dead hooker.
  - schnevets 7y ago
    I received Shenmue for Christmas, 2000. The in-game date shows on every loading screen, starting on December 3rd. I played it so much that first week, the dates intersected and then passed the real life date. Until I beat the game, I kept thinking it was the Shenmue date in the real world. It was a surreal experience.
- mcphage 7y ago
  Similar thing happened to me—I downloaded it in the evening, because I'd heard people talking about it and it sounded interesting. My wife came down at 3:30 in the morning wondering where on earth I was.
- andrepd 7y ago
  >A few days later, I was walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to wait at between my house and campus, and just for a moment looked at those tracks and I seriously thought about where I should place the Minecraft blocks to build a bridge and avoid waiting for the train. This is called the tetris effect. I've had it with, you guessed it, tetris. Whenever I get a bout of addiction and play tetris for an hour at a time I get up from the computer and just start seeing the stuff around me start fitting together in an interlocking fashion. Happened with 2048 as well, I vividly remember being stopped at a red light and feeling the car in front of me fusing the one ahead to make a bigger-numbered car. Very weird. Happens when coding as well, in fact it is happening right now as I type this! I'm having this very strong urge to wrap all "key" words in this post [like so], in ocaml documentation syntax. (* Brains are weird! *)
  - Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
    Try spending ~20 hours in a week playing serious racing sims complete with wheel and real-feeling pedals, then hopping into your car on the weekend to drive cross-state to visit family. I also got this with programming at least once. I had been spending all night trying to get something with my WPF view models working (and failing). When I finally got into bed, I was having trouble falling asleep because I was just "seeing" endless lines of code scrolling through my head. I very distinctly remember thinking, "What order do I have to call these methods again to successfully enter sleep mode?" Quite a bizarre experience.
    - SwiftyBug 7y ago
      I've had some similar experiences. When that happened I couldn't sleep very well and pretty much dreamt of code.
      - samayylmao 7y ago
        My sleep code always compiles and always works as intended.
        7y ago
- agency 7y ago
  That reminds me of when I first discovered emulators as a kid and was playing a lot of SNES Mario classics and shamelessly abusing the quicksave/load functionality. I was playing so much I remember walking around IRL and having the thought pop into my head "this would be a good time to quicksave"
azhenley 7y ago
The YouTube trailer doesn’t show any real footage of the gameplay, sadly.
- NullPrefix 7y ago
  Let's hope this[0] doesn't repeat. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYNriatnYkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYNriatnYkE
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  The verge's preview has lots of expository detail, but no footage either: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18627341/minecraft-earth-ios-android-free-ar-game-features-pokemon-go https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18627341/minecraft-earth-...
- aequitas 7y ago
  It's probably the same as with Pokemon Go[0]. The game is fun on its own, and the geo aspect makes it different and get's you out of the house. But the reality of the VR is grossly overrated and more often a nuisance than something adding to the experience. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Pokemon Go gets better when you turn off the AR mode. Being able to virtually build something in AR mode in Minecraft seems pretty sweet, especially if your friends can see it. Getting the AR to work right won't be easy though, phone positioning is imprecise and it will be really hard for the phone to line something up exactly the same if your friend is viewing it from a different angle. This is one of those game concepts that looks like it would be fun an easy but turns out to be a real nightmare to implement I think.
    - blotter_paper 7y ago
      Yup, we just don't have mass-deployed sensors with high enough precision and accuracy yet. We'll get there.
stuartbman 7y ago
Is this just minecraft pokemon go?
- azhenley 7y ago
  There is a building element to the game but the announcement doesn’t give any details about it. I’m worried it’ll be superficial where you combine materials then just place the single item somewhere.
- demosthenes14 7y ago
  Is any AR game now “[insert name] Pokémon Go”?
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Every FPS is a doom clone.
    - baud147258 7y ago
      every FPS is a wolfenstein clone
      - wolfgke 7y ago
        Every FPS is a MIDI Maze clone.
        rekshaw 7y ago
        Every FPS is a Pong clone
        wolfgke 7y ago
        Pong has no first-person perspective.
vessenes 7y ago
This looks like an expansion of Microsoft’s hololens tech demo from a few years ago, which did a lot of work around identifying in-room surfaces and allowing building on them. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this will be very very popular. This is pitched as virtual collaborative lego, but you get to use your phone at the same time. Hopefully we will see artists play around with it as well; William Gibson wrote a little about AR-based art in the blue ant trilogy; I always thought it was an idea worth thinking a little more about.
gatherhunterer 7y ago
This looks ambitious enough to be met with skepticism. What matters most for gameplay is the UX implementation and AR has serious barriers to overcome in that regard. Holding a device up at eye level for extended periods, interacting with the game by touching the same device that is also serving as the viewport and battery limitations are just a few practical hurdles that have yet to be overcome. What is really hard to believe is that one can recapture the experience or something close to it and that this is not just the expansion of a brand into a new product. Like Pokemon Go, this will likely be Minecraft's equivalent to the Star Wars Christmas Special but without the "so bad it's good" quality.
- criley2 7y ago
  The biggest issue I see is building, because builds take a long time and you don't want to stand around using the worst input imaginable (touch screen) to do nice builds. Other than that, it seems like they're making a Pokemon GO clone with Minecraft mobs (collect passive mobs and fight hostile ones). W.r.t to your "Pokemon Go::SW Christmas Special" you're absolutely wrong, while the initial popularity didn't stick around, the game is at a very strong and profitable point and the ideas introduced in the GO app have moved into actual Pokemon titles, notable the "no fight, just throw to catch pokemon" mechanic was ported to Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee Switch remakes of Gen 1. Basically the opposite of the SW Xmas Special! As a (modded) Minecraft player there's a lot to be excited about in this concept, but my suggestions would be * Allow players to explore the virtual-real-world that they've visited with the phone app from a console or computer. So you can "tag" your local park, a cool bit of a forest, etc, then go home and explore a digital version. * Allow players to build at home The point here would be that you go out side, collect building materials, catch some passive mobs you want, then go home to take advantage of these collected goods to start a pretty build. This would also fix UX issues because the goal of using the phone app would be moving around, collecting, interacting, NOT standing still and building. I'd play the heck out of that, it'd be another reason to get out of the house and an interaction between phone game and console/pc game could be huge.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    > using the worst input imaginable (touch screen) to do nice builds. Minecraft's controls for building stuff is very simple - you just point and click to place or remove stuff depending on your active item. Here you can point (via gyroscope, etc) and tap and you could even "scrub" to remove stuff. This could be done with just a hand (the phone in portrait mode, you tap/scrub with your thumb).
antihero 7y ago
Giant. Dongs. Everywhere.
- mattigames 7y ago
  -
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    From the Verge review I get the impression you only see stuff your friends have placed. They're playing around with ideas on how to let other content in but are well aware of the dong & swastika problem.
    - Jarmsy 7y ago
      Slack on the other hand embraced that problem so much they made their logo a combination of the 2
      - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        I don't see the dong... but I'm too afraid to google "Slack dong".
        vidarh 7y ago
        Four of them. One in each color.
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        <Picard> There...are... four... dongs! </Picard> Thank you, now I'll never unsee it.
      - apocalyptic0n3 7y ago
        I will never be able to look at their new logo the same way again. Thank you for that.
bunderbunder 7y ago
How sad is it that my very first thought was, "How are they planning to manage griefing?"
- pcpie 7y ago
  IRL 2b2t, it's going to be great
- blattimwind 7y ago
  They don't need to, Rockstar and some others have shown that you can make a mint with largely broken games, and even encourage griefing.
petercooper 7y ago
Really neat idea and has the potential to be the next Pokemon Go in terms of engagement, kids roaming around to build in certain real world areas, etc. (Though I am a little sad it's not Minecraft but with a single 'world' server where every player is present.. I would LOVE that :-))
- vanilla_nut 7y ago
  Just how high can a minecraft server scale in player number? I know the worlds are effectively infinite (well, until you get so far out that the terrain generation algorithms actually start to break in the Edgelands), so space isn't an issue... I definitely used servers with hundreds or even thousands of players in the 2000s, so they can scale relatively high in a single instance. I wonder if a clustered minecraft instance could scale effectively infinitely, as long as they synced time?
  - soup10 7y ago
    by limiting the data to only send and recieve changes in the local area you could probably scale it to a very large number of users, especially since latency isn't a super high concern for building. the part i think is difficult to solve is how to protect people's builds from vandalism while still keeping to the idea of a shared creative server. most public servers of minecraft i saw seem to have this problem, atleast thats the way it was when i played it a long time ago
    - vanilla_nut 7y ago
      In my experience this was never a huge problem -- if I remember correctly, servers I played on actually had some ability to "own" areas of the server so you were the only one with edit privileges for that area. And of course there's always the idea of hiding your construction underground or underwater somewhere hard to find :)
      - soup10 7y ago
        From what I understand edit privileges were done using server admin/moderation tools, not sure how well that scales to big mmo type world with thousands of players, especially when you want people to collaborate on big builds.
gibolt 7y ago
This will probably be huge. Minecraft is still super popular, and being able to show off cool real-world footage on YouTube will fuel the fire, engaging others.
wyldfire 7y ago
Notes from the FAQ: > Minecraft Earth will be free to play. > Minecraft Earth is coming to iOS and Android this summer on AR-capable devices. We’ll have more to share soon.
- saddestcatever 7y ago
  Interesting. I can't imagine they're doing all this out of the goodness of their hearts. Wonder if they'll follow the cosmetic upgrade store, or something more akin to PokemonGO's monetization mechanics
  - EvilGrin 7y ago
    The Verge article mentions an in-game currency (rupees) so I expect they are going down the 'in-game shop' route. With the option that you grind for the in-game currency or you can just swap real money for game money. Hopefully they wont make this pay to win and stick to just cosmetics. They have stated in the FAQ that they are not doing loot boxes so there is hope.
blacktonystark 7y ago
Part of me is like "this is dope!" and another part of me is like "are we so lazy/poor due to income inequality that actually learning how to build things is out of the picture now?"
- leesec 7y ago
  Building things is expensive and requires lots of resources. Kids don't have those.
- robrtsql 7y ago
  I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. Virtual building is great because it lets people build things without having to be limited by the space they have available or the materials they have to build with (in Minecraft (creative mode, at least), you never run out of the color block that you need, unlike playing with Lego in real life).
- codycraven 7y ago
  The desire to build stuff as a kid without the funds to buy wood/metal is what got me into programming. I could have either bought materials for 1-3 projects and then not been able to build anything else, or build a computer (back then it was cheaper to build than buy) and then have limitless ability to build things digitally.
asah 7y ago
wait, something that teenagers can see, but parents can't? who would want that? ($B in 15 minutes)
jbattle 7y ago
This doesn't look like a freeform building game. It's really hard to tell from the trailer but it looks like you can pick some pre-fab constructions or animals and plop them down into specific places in the world. Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right 1) boring 2) that will at least keep minecraft earth from being covered in swastikas and genitalia
- pcpie 7y ago
  you could still place multiple prefabs in the from of a swastika/penis then id imagine
- VikingCoder 7y ago
  I suspect you will build a prefab yourself, in a petri dish, and then place it in the real world. I say this because, you won't want to climb 100 feet in the air, to place a block on top of that castle.
  - NikkiA 7y ago
    As the protagonist skated past the cafe she saw what I would assume to be the petri-dish construction occurring on the cafe table.
baalimago 7y ago
Just give kids some legos...
- mattigames 7y ago
  Ok but you pay them
yohann305 7y ago
i foresee kids dying after falling from cliffs or buildings, trying to build things "in the sky". Mark my words, i said it first
- gubbrora 7y ago
  Wordmarked i could see this happen
lloydde 7y ago
You “see a patch of grass” could read awfully dystopian. That opening paragraph might come back to haunt them. With climate change possibly accelerating unless global coordinated activity, I giggled at first to this opener that basically says cover that “patch” of “real-life” nature. > Picture the scene: you’re walking through your neighbourhood and see a patch of grass. Grass is lovely and all, but you see this patch every day. It’s getting a little dull and is practically begging for a talented builder to brighten it up. So you take out your phone and craft a beautiful Minecraft build on a nearby picnic table. Then you place your colourful new Minecraft creation on the real-life grass.
- anchpop 7y ago
  Are you proposing that due to climate change, there is a serious possibility of the extinction of grass?
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Agreed on the skepticism. Grass is the plant equivalent of cockroaches. There will always be grass. (And specifically, the C4 species are pretty robust)
  - lloydde 7y ago
    Not by any means. The narrative is covering nature, covering the limited park space with augmented reality. This is likely going to sour some parents on it. It would have been much smarter to speak to an urban setting.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  What is the technical term for being a “doom and gloomer”? Because i have to tell you, when even video game posts that mention grass can be about climate change - it’s not helping the cause. It’s going to make people sick of hearing about it - regardless if they agree and won’t sway someone if they don’t. I assume there is a better term for scandal fatigue. That some smart HN user knows.
  - 7y ago
wtdata 7y ago
This is brilliant... and PKDickian (is this a term? it should be). We can imagine a distopic future with a thin boundary between the physical world and VR where you would travel through totally destitute neighbourhoods in real life, while seeing great works of art in VR that were built by the users of a virtual world game akin to this.
- milquetoastaf 7y ago
  Lol dude its just pokemon go but with minecraft
- pawelmurias 7y ago
  That would be super cliche.
OrgNet 7y ago
I wonder if you can choose the block size to make your creations look more realistic?
fenomas 7y ago
Since there's not much info on this, and since I missed the relevant thread last week, I'll just note here for the record that Mojang's other recent release, a browser-based retro game called Minecraft Classic, was built on my voxel game engine. [game] https://classic.minecraft.net/ https://classic.minecraft.net/ [engine] https://github.com/andyhall/noa/ https://github.com/andyhall/noa/ if anyone's interested. It's pretty weird waking up one morning to find out that Mojang built a game on your tiny solo project...
- ralphstodomingo 7y ago
  Congratulations! Really cool of them and you. Is there a statement from Minecraft how much they'll be developing this?
  - fenomas 7y ago
    Thank you! But I don't know a thing about it - I only found out it existed because an internet citizen looked at the source and let me know.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      It's a little bizarre that they didn't get in touch with you at all.
      - brainpool 7y ago
        Modus operandi of predatory organisations.
        dbt00 7y ago
        Or, completely in keeping with the open source license he made it under? https://github.com/andyhall/noa/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/andyhall/noa/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
        WilliamEdward 7y ago
jdavid 7y ago
The ad for Minecraft Earth, reminds me of a cyberpunk novel, Spook Country, by William Gibson. In the novel, there are layers of augmented reality where people have put their mark on the world with AR Dioramas scattered through-out the world. In the book, AR scenes might depict historical events, art, or information. If your planing on Playing Minecraft:Earth, you might want to check it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-Ant-Book-ebook/dp/B000UVBSYQ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18ZCM1YV438V2&keywords=spook+country&qid=1558106487&s=digital-text&sprefix=spook+country%2Caps%2C203&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-Ant-Book-ebook/dp/...
_mitch 7y ago
In the official reveal trailer, they seriously have the actor take out their phone and walk backward into the road while looking at their phone. Who cleared that? [1] https://youtu.be/dYKxBKj29dI https://youtu.be/dYKxBKj29dI
orblivion 7y ago
The first thing I got while watching this was a flash of the apocalypse when Gab (the social network) inevitably comes out with their own version.
logfromblammo 7y ago
I am already disappointed by the vast gulf between how I imagine Minecraft could work as an AR game and how I imagine it will initially be implemented as an AR game. The problem with Ingress and Pokemon Go, is that the player has to go places in real life to have fun in the game, and one attraction of fantasy sandbox worlds is that you have mobility capabilities that are impossible in your real life. In regular Minecraft, creative mode, you can fly and hover. This is extremely alluring to a kid who may otherwise only be able to ride a bicycle around their own boring subdivision neighborhood during daylight hours. Hey, it's even nice for people who have cars. If the kids have to beg Mom or Dad to drive them across town in the real world to mine virtual diamonds, that's not going to end up being fun for anybody. People play games where they live, and if the AR game does not include people's homes as a legitimate place to play, then having fun includes some amount of inconvenience that sours it. Some people can tap a Pokestop or Portal from their bedroom or living room. Other people have to drive ten minutes to reach the nearest one. The best I can come up with is that players use their mobile devices in the real world to mark their territory or drop warp points or exchange friend tokens or do discovery, and they can still build or explore the whole world from home. Geo-tagged photos might be able to update textures and geometry. If someone builds a grand castle in the neighborhood park, that's not going to work in AR if you have to climb stairs that don't exist or go below ground when there is no real-world hole. But maybe you could see there is a castle there, through the discovery glass at the park, tap the block that grants your user read-only visitor access to it, and then go back home to climb the tower or explore the dungeons. If someone else builds a different castle overlapping over the same territory, you can decide which user's construction appears in your personal sandbox.
billconan 7y ago
I want to see a gameplay video. the occlusion effect in AR doesn't seem to be easy to implement. I previously saw a startup doing it using a detailed 3d scan of a city.
- pducks32 7y ago
  The occlusion would need scans form the phone which I can think of one company that can do it fast, then you need to figure out where in the world the user is if you want to occlude using buildings, etc. I know of one company doing that. Neither are working with Microsoft as far as I know. (I work for the latter company and we do VPS: the thing you'd need to build the game I assume people will glean from the video but they are totally not releasing.)
4bpp 7y ago
From the looks of the promotional video (glassy boxes displayed around every object), it seems like the implementation of this is closer to "geotagged Minecraft objects, which are NPCs or finite-sized voxel volumes" than "Minecraft overlay on the real world". I'd consider that to be a safe-but-boring option for them to go with - the implementation is easier and you can probably control access to your creation to prevent it from being destroyed by griefers, but on the other hand there will probably be no way two discrete objects could be spontaneously linked up in a creative way, no irreverent and fun third-party modifications to objects of the sort that their creators would have rejected if asked to allow upfront but would grudgingly admit to be pretty clever afterwards, and (although the last point is quite subjective) interacting with what are essentially more intricately customised Google Maps pins will probably never feel as immersive as navigating a unified overlay to the real world.
- wilg 7y ago
  I would imagine it would be really hard to make the voxel coordinate system spatially coherent over the whole planet, so placing smallish regions of buildable space at various geotagged points seems like a pragmatic approach. You could still design it to get the types of interactions you're after. Edit: To clarify I think it’s hard because of the earth not being flat but also because of the difficulty of syncing AR tracking to GPS tracking in a device independent way. You’d get a lot of error depending on how you attached the two reference frames together. Having many smaller buildable spaces means you can have lower accuracy from GPS but still make the world feel populated. The cubes wouldn’t align between volumes but the volumes can be in close proximity.
  - 4bpp 7y ago
    Good point about the coordinate system; you'd run into one sort of trouble or another if you want to go with anything that's approximately "cubes" (i.e. say each voxel is a "cube" of fixed height × fixed #degrees of latitude × fixed #degrees of longitude) unless you exclude two circles of the planet's surface from the game (say, some radius around each of the poles), and even then, you would have to contend with voxels having a different size depending on where on earth you are. Possible (if off-brand) solution: a Minecraft based on the extrusion of an icosahedral tiling of the sphere [1], with voxels that are triangle prisms rather than cubes. Maybe an idea for someone who wants to design an AR game and does not have to sell it as a Minecraft variant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_polyhedron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_polyhedron
allenu 7y ago
To me, this feels like the perfect app for AR. It's creative (you make stuff) and your creations live in the real world, encouraging people to get out there. If this turns out to be a really great app and it isn't successful, I wonder if we can take that as a signal from the market that people aren't that interested in AR, at least not in its current phone-based state.
sneak 7y ago
This existed in 2012, and was called “minecraft reality”: https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/25/3688674/minecraft-augmented-reality-iphone-app https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/25/3688674/minecraft-augmen...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
stesch 7y ago
Reminds me of "Rainbows End". Remember the scene when the kids go to school and overlay the building on the way? (And all the other overlays/skins.)
anderspitman 7y ago
It would be really cool if this enables "Minecraft artists" to build and place impressive models. I'm an avid hiker and would love knowing I can pull out my phone at the top of a mountain to see a digital model that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. Sort of like an imaginary geocache.
jhoh 7y ago
I was going to sign up for the beta but then was asked to log in with a Microsoft account. Thanks but nope.
settsu 7y ago
> Picture the scene: you’re walking through your neighbourhood and see a patch of grass. Grass is lovely and all, but you see this patch every day. It’s getting a little dull and is practically begging for a talented builder to brighten it up. So you take out your phone and craft a beautiful Minecraft build on a nearby picnic table. Then you place your colourful new Minecraft creation on the real-life grass. So now we're gamifying gentrification and incentivizing the idea of covering the earth with human constructions? (It's certainly arguable, but at least Pokemon Go encourages physical activity and social interaction.) Yes, I know I'm being reactionary but this just feels wrong, not to mention a misguided application of the Minecraft concept. Is this is the best they could do? Is this really all we can expect of AR at this stage?
Fricken 7y ago
This is my favorite augmented reality game: https://youtu.be/8t4pmlHRokg https://youtu.be/8t4pmlHRokg
hyperpallium 7y ago
Sorry! This version of Minecraft requires a keyboard. Please try again on another device. But I have a bluetooth keyboard connected to my phone...

441 points by eDameXxX 7y ago

Dicks, dicks everywhere.

This reminds me of when I first discovered Minecraft in university. I was just going to play for a couple hours before bed, and I got sucked into the game-loop and before I knew it the sun was coming up. A few days later, I was walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to wait at between my house and campus, and just for a moment looked at those tracks and I seriously thought about where I should place the Minecraft blocks to build a bridge and avoid waiting for the train. I decided to take a long break from Minecraft after that.

retube 7y ago
My kids are obsessed. Literally everything they say to me starts with "Daddy, on minecraft, ...." It's all they talk about, including with each other. They even act it out in playtime. Although as someone who has never played I basically understand nothing they are telling me. It seems pretty creative tho, and they seem to be learning a lot from it, so not too bothered. That said they are limited to 1 hour per sat and sun.
- ethbro 7y ago
  Sounds like a good time for a valuable life lesson about gauging counterparty interest in the topic at hand. Which so many people in the CS program at uni could have used. shudders, remembering a 20 minute "conversation" about DnD crossbow rules I somehow ended up in
  - spongo 7y ago
    (not the gp) I agree with you, ethbro, it is a valuable life lesson. I can personally attribute most of my social successes to the ability to gauge the interlocutor and their interests, and such a skill will gain one a rep as a good listener.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Not in reference to the aforementioned children, because that's normal behavior for kids, but I think of active listening as not being a conversational sociopath. I'm convinced some people instead have a mantra of "When do I get to talk again?" looping in their head whenever someone else is speaking.
      - derefr 7y ago
        On the other hand, I feel like some people have internalized this idea a bit too well, and apply it in places it doesn’t belong, becoming offended (for social-norm-violation reasons) when someone gives a tangential reply in a threaded comment system like HN’s or Reddit’s, because the tangent is “derailing the conversation” or “not addressing the topic.” Except, of course, that’s impossible; a tangential reply likely won’t even be the first reply people see in the sub-thread, after they get re-sorted by vote, so the only people who will engage with it are the people who never cared about the original topic in the first place.
  - vlunkr 7y ago
    Eh, sounds like these are young kids. It's more important to let them be excited about something and share that with you. Besides, what shared interests do you really have as a parent? It's not like your kids are going to discuss politics or their critique of Avengers: Endgame.
- saddestcatever 7y ago
  Minecraft is one of the few games that I think everyone should try. It's not just "another video game", but something quite unique. It hits a certain part of the brain in both "creative expression" and "exploring the unknown" that we exercise so rarely in day to day life (or in other games). It's no wonder it really sticks with kids and becomes a way for them to express imagination. Make sure you sit down and try playing with them at some point, it'll be a fun learning experience for everyone involved.
  - jsilence 7y ago
    What would be a sensible minimum age for minecraft?
    - tVoss42 7y ago
      As soon as they can use a mouse and keyboard or controller. Seriously though, there's no mature themes in it at all, and if the gameplay is too difficult there's always creative mode which is literally digital legos. There's also a multiplayer where they can connect to servers and play with other people. That's where you might want to use some discretion, as the experience will vary from server to server.
    - sandworm101 7y ago
      Solo modes: whenever they can manipulate the interface. Online/shared server modes: when they understand the evils of the internet well enough to be safe. Setup and admin a server yourself. Watch how they play. Dont let it get too big. A dozen or two per server. Dont let them play with thousands of total strangers. That always ends in tears.
      - retube 7y ago
        Can a server be hosted at home, or does it need to be on a proper hosting platform? Windows or linux?
        allannienhuis 7y ago
- simonh 7y ago
  Mine got into it aged 8 and 9 and at least one of them still plays occasionally. She's 14 now. No regrets, it’s been good for them. It’s 21st century Lego. They create homes and worlds and share them with their friends, play competitive building games online, play team games of all sorts. It seems like a great online play space with a strong creative streak in it. I think it's a much better use of their time than watching cartoons. Although I did get my girls into Sailor Moon and the modern run of My Little Pony. I'm a strong believer in giving kids a grounding in the Classics.
  - voidmain0001 7y ago
    "...a grounding in the Classics." Thanks, that made me laugh!
  - toyg 7y ago
    The classics for me were Urusei Yatsura, Lupin III, Captain Tsubasa, Mirai Shōnen Conan, Goldrake/Grendizer... man, I feel old.
beeandapenguin 7y ago
Sounds like you caught a drift of the Tetris Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
- hirundo 7y ago
  When I was playing Assassin's Creed I kept analyzing buildings for the best way to parkour to the top. Now I'm playing Stardew Valley and every vacant space looks like a good spot to plant strawberries.
  - gbrown 7y ago
    The difference is that empty spaces really are a good place to plant strawberries.
  - Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
    I always get these weird experiences when I've been really into playing some game, and then happen to half wake up in the middle of the night. I'll be in this bizarre half-awake, half-asleep state where I'm quasi-dreaming that I'm living in the game world and I won't be able to get the dream/hallucination to stop. Right now I'm getting seriously into Factorio, and I had this experience a few nights ago. I half-woke up and kept having these thought-hallucinations about the best method to use to optimize the way my resource refiners were feeding into my main bus, because I needed to make X% more sleep-cogs in order to go back to sleep. It's actually kind of infuriating when it happens, sometimes it keeps me in that half-awake state for as long as thirty minutes. Been happening to me since I was a kid.
  - zachberger 7y ago
    I have the same thing but with Breath of the Wild. I want to climb buildings and hang glide across the city.
usaphp 7y ago
It happens to me with Google, When I lose something at home the first thing I think about is how do I google where to find it
wingerlang 7y ago
The first time I played it (infdev or indev) I think I played it nonstop for 24h+, then I basically never played it again. As for the "seeing blocks". I had a period where I played some form of match-3 game, and while walking around I couldn't stop imagining arranging people walking into threes.
jasonmp85 7y ago
I mean, this is better than the time I stayed up all night playing GTA San Andreas in a friend's dorm room during college and while drowsily stumbling home felt an intense need to flee when I heard police sirens approaching.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  I was relieved when that story didn't end with you taking your money back from a dead hooker.
- schnevets 7y ago
  I received Shenmue for Christmas, 2000. The in-game date shows on every loading screen, starting on December 3rd. I played it so much that first week, the dates intersected and then passed the real life date. Until I beat the game, I kept thinking it was the Shenmue date in the real world. It was a surreal experience.
mcphage 7y ago
Similar thing happened to me—I downloaded it in the evening, because I'd heard people talking about it and it sounded interesting. My wife came down at 3:30 in the morning wondering where on earth I was.
andrepd 7y ago
>A few days later, I was walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to wait at between my house and campus, and just for a moment looked at those tracks and I seriously thought about where I should place the Minecraft blocks to build a bridge and avoid waiting for the train. This is called the tetris effect. I've had it with, you guessed it, tetris. Whenever I get a bout of addiction and play tetris for an hour at a time I get up from the computer and just start seeing the stuff around me start fitting together in an interlocking fashion. Happened with 2048 as well, I vividly remember being stopped at a red light and feeling the car in front of me fusing the one ahead to make a bigger-numbered car. Very weird. Happens when coding as well, in fact it is happening right now as I type this! I'm having this very strong urge to wrap all "key" words in this post [like so], in ocaml documentation syntax. (* Brains are weird! *)
- Gene_Parmesan 7y ago
  Try spending ~20 hours in a week playing serious racing sims complete with wheel and real-feeling pedals, then hopping into your car on the weekend to drive cross-state to visit family. I also got this with programming at least once. I had been spending all night trying to get something with my WPF view models working (and failing). When I finally got into bed, I was having trouble falling asleep because I was just "seeing" endless lines of code scrolling through my head. I very distinctly remember thinking, "What order do I have to call these methods again to successfully enter sleep mode?" Quite a bizarre experience.
  - SwiftyBug 7y ago
    I've had some similar experiences. When that happened I couldn't sleep very well and pretty much dreamt of code.
    - samayylmao 7y ago
      My sleep code always compiles and always works as intended.
      - 7y ago
agency 7y ago
That reminds me of when I first discovered emulators as a kid and was playing a lot of SNES Mario classics and shamelessly abusing the quicksave/load functionality. I was playing so much I remember walking around IRL and having the thought pop into my head "this would be a good time to quicksave"

azhenley 7y ago

The YouTube trailer doesn’t show any real footage of the gameplay, sadly.

NullPrefix 7y ago
Let's hope this[0] doesn't repeat. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYNriatnYkE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYNriatnYkE
bryanlarsen 7y ago
The verge's preview has lots of expository detail, but no footage either: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18627341/minecraft-earth-ios-android-free-ar-game-features-pokemon-go https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/17/18627341/minecraft-earth-...
aequitas 7y ago
It's probably the same as with Pokemon Go[0]. The game is fun on its own, and the geo aspect makes it different and get's you out of the house. But the reality of the VR is grossly overrated and more often a nuisance than something adding to the experience. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs
- jandrese 7y ago
  Pokemon Go gets better when you turn off the AR mode. Being able to virtually build something in AR mode in Minecraft seems pretty sweet, especially if your friends can see it. Getting the AR to work right won't be easy though, phone positioning is imprecise and it will be really hard for the phone to line something up exactly the same if your friend is viewing it from a different angle. This is one of those game concepts that looks like it would be fun an easy but turns out to be a real nightmare to implement I think.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    Yup, we just don't have mass-deployed sensors with high enough precision and accuracy yet. We'll get there.

stuartbman 7y ago

Is this just minecraft pokemon go?

azhenley 7y ago
There is a building element to the game but the announcement doesn’t give any details about it. I’m worried it’ll be superficial where you combine materials then just place the single item somewhere.
demosthenes14 7y ago
Is any AR game now “[insert name] Pokémon Go”?
- imtringued 7y ago
  Every FPS is a doom clone.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    every FPS is a wolfenstein clone
    - wolfgke 7y ago
      Every FPS is a MIDI Maze clone.
      - rekshaw 7y ago
        Every FPS is a Pong clone
        wolfgke 7y ago
        Pong has no first-person perspective.

vessenes 7y ago

This looks like an expansion of Microsoft’s hololens tech demo from a few years ago, which did a lot of work around identifying in-room surfaces and allowing building on them. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this will be very very popular. This is pitched as virtual collaborative lego, but you get to use your phone at the same time. Hopefully we will see artists play around with it as well; William Gibson wrote a little about AR-based art in the blue ant trilogy; I always thought it was an idea worth thinking a little more about.

gatherhunterer 7y ago

This looks ambitious enough to be met with skepticism. What matters most for gameplay is the UX implementation and AR has serious barriers to overcome in that regard. Holding a device up at eye level for extended periods, interacting with the game by touching the same device that is also serving as the viewport and battery limitations are just a few practical hurdles that have yet to be overcome. What is really hard to believe is that one can recapture the experience or something close to it and that this is not just the expansion of a brand into a new product. Like Pokemon Go, this will likely be Minecraft's equivalent to the Star Wars Christmas Special but without the "so bad it's good" quality.

criley2 7y ago
The biggest issue I see is building, because builds take a long time and you don't want to stand around using the worst input imaginable (touch screen) to do nice builds. Other than that, it seems like they're making a Pokemon GO clone with Minecraft mobs (collect passive mobs and fight hostile ones). W.r.t to your "Pokemon Go::SW Christmas Special" you're absolutely wrong, while the initial popularity didn't stick around, the game is at a very strong and profitable point and the ideas introduced in the GO app have moved into actual Pokemon titles, notable the "no fight, just throw to catch pokemon" mechanic was ported to Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee Switch remakes of Gen 1. Basically the opposite of the SW Xmas Special! As a (modded) Minecraft player there's a lot to be excited about in this concept, but my suggestions would be * Allow players to explore the virtual-real-world that they've visited with the phone app from a console or computer. So you can "tag" your local park, a cool bit of a forest, etc, then go home and explore a digital version. * Allow players to build at home The point here would be that you go out side, collect building materials, catch some passive mobs you want, then go home to take advantage of these collected goods to start a pretty build. This would also fix UX issues because the goal of using the phone app would be moving around, collecting, interacting, NOT standing still and building. I'd play the heck out of that, it'd be another reason to get out of the house and an interaction between phone game and console/pc game could be huge.
- Crinus 7y ago
  > using the worst input imaginable (touch screen) to do nice builds. Minecraft's controls for building stuff is very simple - you just point and click to place or remove stuff depending on your active item. Here you can point (via gyroscope, etc) and tap and you could even "scrub" to remove stuff. This could be done with just a hand (the phone in portrait mode, you tap/scrub with your thumb).

antihero 7y ago

Giant. Dongs. Everywhere.

mattigames 7y ago
-
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  From the Verge review I get the impression you only see stuff your friends have placed. They're playing around with ideas on how to let other content in but are well aware of the dong & swastika problem.
  - Jarmsy 7y ago
    Slack on the other hand embraced that problem so much they made their logo a combination of the 2
    - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
      I don't see the dong... but I'm too afraid to google "Slack dong".
      - vidarh 7y ago
        Four of them. One in each color.
        SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
        <Picard> There...are... four... dongs! </Picard> Thank you, now I'll never unsee it.
    - apocalyptic0n3 7y ago
      I will never be able to look at their new logo the same way again. Thank you for that.

bunderbunder 7y ago

How sad is it that my very first thought was, "How are they planning to manage griefing?"

pcpie 7y ago
IRL 2b2t, it's going to be great
blattimwind 7y ago
They don't need to, Rockstar and some others have shown that you can make a mint with largely broken games, and even encourage griefing.

petercooper 7y ago

Really neat idea and has the potential to be the next Pokemon Go in terms of engagement, kids roaming around to build in certain real world areas, etc. (Though I am a little sad it's not Minecraft but with a single 'world' server where every player is present.. I would LOVE that :-))

vanilla_nut 7y ago
Just how high can a minecraft server scale in player number? I know the worlds are effectively infinite (well, until you get so far out that the terrain generation algorithms actually start to break in the Edgelands), so space isn't an issue... I definitely used servers with hundreds or even thousands of players in the 2000s, so they can scale relatively high in a single instance. I wonder if a clustered minecraft instance could scale effectively infinitely, as long as they synced time?
- soup10 7y ago
  by limiting the data to only send and recieve changes in the local area you could probably scale it to a very large number of users, especially since latency isn't a super high concern for building. the part i think is difficult to solve is how to protect people's builds from vandalism while still keeping to the idea of a shared creative server. most public servers of minecraft i saw seem to have this problem, atleast thats the way it was when i played it a long time ago
  - vanilla_nut 7y ago
    In my experience this was never a huge problem -- if I remember correctly, servers I played on actually had some ability to "own" areas of the server so you were the only one with edit privileges for that area. And of course there's always the idea of hiding your construction underground or underwater somewhere hard to find :)
    - soup10 7y ago
      From what I understand edit privileges were done using server admin/moderation tools, not sure how well that scales to big mmo type world with thousands of players, especially when you want people to collaborate on big builds.

gibolt 7y ago

This will probably be huge. Minecraft is still super popular, and being able to show off cool real-world footage on YouTube will fuel the fire, engaging others.

wyldfire 7y ago

Notes from the FAQ: > Minecraft Earth will be free to play. > Minecraft Earth is coming to iOS and Android this summer on AR-capable devices. We’ll have more to share soon.

saddestcatever 7y ago
Interesting. I can't imagine they're doing all this out of the goodness of their hearts. Wonder if they'll follow the cosmetic upgrade store, or something more akin to PokemonGO's monetization mechanics
- EvilGrin 7y ago
  The Verge article mentions an in-game currency (rupees) so I expect they are going down the 'in-game shop' route. With the option that you grind for the in-game currency or you can just swap real money for game money. Hopefully they wont make this pay to win and stick to just cosmetics. They have stated in the FAQ that they are not doing loot boxes so there is hope.

blacktonystark 7y ago

Part of me is like "this is dope!" and another part of me is like "are we so lazy/poor due to income inequality that actually learning how to build things is out of the picture now?"

leesec 7y ago
Building things is expensive and requires lots of resources. Kids don't have those.
robrtsql 7y ago
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. Virtual building is great because it lets people build things without having to be limited by the space they have available or the materials they have to build with (in Minecraft (creative mode, at least), you never run out of the color block that you need, unlike playing with Lego in real life).
codycraven 7y ago
The desire to build stuff as a kid without the funds to buy wood/metal is what got me into programming. I could have either bought materials for 1-3 projects and then not been able to build anything else, or build a computer (back then it was cheaper to build than buy) and then have limitless ability to build things digitally.

asah 7y ago

wait, something that teenagers can see, but parents can't? who would want that? ($B in 15 minutes)

jbattle 7y ago

This doesn't look like a freeform building game. It's really hard to tell from the trailer but it looks like you can pick some pre-fab constructions or animals and plop them down into specific places in the world. Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right 1) boring 2) that will at least keep minecraft earth from being covered in swastikas and genitalia

pcpie 7y ago
you could still place multiple prefabs in the from of a swastika/penis then id imagine
VikingCoder 7y ago
I suspect you will build a prefab yourself, in a petri dish, and then place it in the real world. I say this because, you won't want to climb 100 feet in the air, to place a block on top of that castle.
- NikkiA 7y ago
  As the protagonist skated past the cafe she saw what I would assume to be the petri-dish construction occurring on the cafe table.

baalimago 7y ago

Just give kids some legos...

mattigames 7y ago
Ok but you pay them

yohann305 7y ago

i foresee kids dying after falling from cliffs or buildings, trying to build things "in the sky". Mark my words, i said it first

gubbrora 7y ago
Wordmarked i could see this happen

lloydde 7y ago

You “see a patch of grass” could read awfully dystopian. That opening paragraph might come back to haunt them. With climate change possibly accelerating unless global coordinated activity, I giggled at first to this opener that basically says cover that “patch” of “real-life” nature. > Picture the scene: you’re walking through your neighbourhood and see a patch of grass. Grass is lovely and all, but you see this patch every day. It’s getting a little dull and is practically begging for a talented builder to brighten it up. So you take out your phone and craft a beautiful Minecraft build on a nearby picnic table. Then you place your colourful new Minecraft creation on the real-life grass.

anchpop 7y ago
Are you proposing that due to climate change, there is a serious possibility of the extinction of grass?
- ethbro 7y ago
  Agreed on the skepticism. Grass is the plant equivalent of cockroaches. There will always be grass. (And specifically, the C4 species are pretty robust)
- lloydde 7y ago
  Not by any means. The narrative is covering nature, covering the limited park space with augmented reality. This is likely going to sour some parents on it. It would have been much smarter to speak to an urban setting.
SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
What is the technical term for being a “doom and gloomer”? Because i have to tell you, when even video game posts that mention grass can be about climate change - it’s not helping the cause. It’s going to make people sick of hearing about it - regardless if they agree and won’t sway someone if they don’t. I assume there is a better term for scandal fatigue. That some smart HN user knows.
- 7y ago

wtdata 7y ago

This is brilliant... and PKDickian (is this a term? it should be). We can imagine a distopic future with a thin boundary between the physical world and VR where you would travel through totally destitute neighbourhoods in real life, while seeing great works of art in VR that were built by the users of a virtual world game akin to this.

milquetoastaf 7y ago
Lol dude its just pokemon go but with minecraft
pawelmurias 7y ago
That would be super cliche.

OrgNet 7y ago

I wonder if you can choose the block size to make your creations look more realistic?

fenomas 7y ago

Since there's not much info on this, and since I missed the relevant thread last week, I'll just note here for the record that Mojang's other recent release, a browser-based retro game called Minecraft Classic, was built on my voxel game engine. [game] https://classic.minecraft.net/ https://classic.minecraft.net/ [engine] https://github.com/andyhall/noa/ https://github.com/andyhall/noa/ if anyone's interested. It's pretty weird waking up one morning to find out that Mojang built a game on your tiny solo project...

ralphstodomingo 7y ago
Congratulations! Really cool of them and you. Is there a statement from Minecraft how much they'll be developing this?
- fenomas 7y ago
  Thank you! But I don't know a thing about it - I only found out it existed because an internet citizen looked at the source and let me know.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    It's a little bizarre that they didn't get in touch with you at all.
    - brainpool 7y ago
      Modus operandi of predatory organisations.
      - dbt00 7y ago
        Or, completely in keeping with the open source license he made it under? https://github.com/andyhall/noa/blob/master/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/andyhall/noa/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
      - WilliamEdward 7y ago

jdavid 7y ago

The ad for Minecraft Earth, reminds me of a cyberpunk novel, Spook Country, by William Gibson. In the novel, there are layers of augmented reality where people have put their mark on the world with AR Dioramas scattered through-out the world. In the book, AR scenes might depict historical events, art, or information. If your planing on Playing Minecraft:Earth, you might want to check it out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-Ant-Book-ebook/dp/B000UVBSYQ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18ZCM1YV438V2&keywords=spook+country&qid=1558106487&s=digital-text&sprefix=spook+country%2Caps%2C203&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-Ant-Book-ebook/dp/...

_mitch 7y ago

In the official reveal trailer, they seriously have the actor take out their phone and walk backward into the road while looking at their phone. Who cleared that? [1] https://youtu.be/dYKxBKj29dI https://youtu.be/dYKxBKj29dI

orblivion 7y ago

The first thing I got while watching this was a flash of the apocalypse when Gab (the social network) inevitably comes out with their own version.

logfromblammo 7y ago

I am already disappointed by the vast gulf between how I imagine Minecraft could work as an AR game and how I imagine it will initially be implemented as an AR game. The problem with Ingress and Pokemon Go, is that the player has to go places in real life to have fun in the game, and one attraction of fantasy sandbox worlds is that you have mobility capabilities that are impossible in your real life. In regular Minecraft, creative mode, you can fly and hover. This is extremely alluring to a kid who may otherwise only be able to ride a bicycle around their own boring subdivision neighborhood during daylight hours. Hey, it's even nice for people who have cars. If the kids have to beg Mom or Dad to drive them across town in the real world to mine virtual diamonds, that's not going to end up being fun for anybody. People play games where they live, and if the AR game does not include people's homes as a legitimate place to play, then having fun includes some amount of inconvenience that sours it. Some people can tap a Pokestop or Portal from their bedroom or living room. Other people have to drive ten minutes to reach the nearest one. The best I can come up with is that players use their mobile devices in the real world to mark their territory or drop warp points or exchange friend tokens or do discovery, and they can still build or explore the whole world from home. Geo-tagged photos might be able to update textures and geometry. If someone builds a grand castle in the neighborhood park, that's not going to work in AR if you have to climb stairs that don't exist or go below ground when there is no real-world hole. But maybe you could see there is a castle there, through the discovery glass at the park, tap the block that grants your user read-only visitor access to it, and then go back home to climb the tower or explore the dungeons. If someone else builds a different castle overlapping over the same territory, you can decide which user's construction appears in your personal sandbox.

billconan 7y ago

I want to see a gameplay video. the occlusion effect in AR doesn't seem to be easy to implement. I previously saw a startup doing it using a detailed 3d scan of a city.

pducks32 7y ago
The occlusion would need scans form the phone which I can think of one company that can do it fast, then you need to figure out where in the world the user is if you want to occlude using buildings, etc. I know of one company doing that. Neither are working with Microsoft as far as I know. (I work for the latter company and we do VPS: the thing you'd need to build the game I assume people will glean from the video but they are totally not releasing.)

4bpp 7y ago

From the looks of the promotional video (glassy boxes displayed around every object), it seems like the implementation of this is closer to "geotagged Minecraft objects, which are NPCs or finite-sized voxel volumes" than "Minecraft overlay on the real world". I'd consider that to be a safe-but-boring option for them to go with - the implementation is easier and you can probably control access to your creation to prevent it from being destroyed by griefers, but on the other hand there will probably be no way two discrete objects could be spontaneously linked up in a creative way, no irreverent and fun third-party modifications to objects of the sort that their creators would have rejected if asked to allow upfront but would grudgingly admit to be pretty clever afterwards, and (although the last point is quite subjective) interacting with what are essentially more intricately customised Google Maps pins will probably never feel as immersive as navigating a unified overlay to the real world.

wilg 7y ago
I would imagine it would be really hard to make the voxel coordinate system spatially coherent over the whole planet, so placing smallish regions of buildable space at various geotagged points seems like a pragmatic approach. You could still design it to get the types of interactions you're after. Edit: To clarify I think it’s hard because of the earth not being flat but also because of the difficulty of syncing AR tracking to GPS tracking in a device independent way. You’d get a lot of error depending on how you attached the two reference frames together. Having many smaller buildable spaces means you can have lower accuracy from GPS but still make the world feel populated. The cubes wouldn’t align between volumes but the volumes can be in close proximity.
- 4bpp 7y ago
  Good point about the coordinate system; you'd run into one sort of trouble or another if you want to go with anything that's approximately "cubes" (i.e. say each voxel is a "cube" of fixed height × fixed #degrees of latitude × fixed #degrees of longitude) unless you exclude two circles of the planet's surface from the game (say, some radius around each of the poles), and even then, you would have to contend with voxels having a different size depending on where on earth you are. Possible (if off-brand) solution: a Minecraft based on the extrusion of an icosahedral tiling of the sphere [1], with voxels that are triangle prisms rather than cubes. Maybe an idea for someone who wants to design an AR game and does not have to sell it as a Minecraft variant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_polyhedron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_polyhedron

allenu 7y ago

To me, this feels like the perfect app for AR. It's creative (you make stuff) and your creations live in the real world, encouraging people to get out there. If this turns out to be a really great app and it isn't successful, I wonder if we can take that as a signal from the market that people aren't that interested in AR, at least not in its current phone-based state.

sneak 7y ago

This existed in 2012, and was called “minecraft reality”: https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/25/3688674/minecraft-augmented-reality-iphone-app https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/25/3688674/minecraft-augmen...

deleted 7y ago

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stesch 7y ago

Reminds me of "Rainbows End". Remember the scene when the kids go to school and overlay the building on the way? (And all the other overlays/skins.)

anderspitman 7y ago

It would be really cool if this enables "Minecraft artists" to build and place impressive models. I'm an avid hiker and would love knowing I can pull out my phone at the top of a mountain to see a digital model that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. Sort of like an imaginary geocache.

jhoh 7y ago

I was going to sign up for the beta but then was asked to log in with a Microsoft account. Thanks but nope.

settsu 7y ago

> Picture the scene: you’re walking through your neighbourhood and see a patch of grass. Grass is lovely and all, but you see this patch every day. It’s getting a little dull and is practically begging for a talented builder to brighten it up. So you take out your phone and craft a beautiful Minecraft build on a nearby picnic table. Then you place your colourful new Minecraft creation on the real-life grass. So now we're gamifying gentrification and incentivizing the idea of covering the earth with human constructions? (It's certainly arguable, but at least Pokemon Go encourages physical activity and social interaction.) Yes, I know I'm being reactionary but this just feels wrong, not to mention a misguided application of the Minecraft concept. Is this is the best they could do? Is this really all we can expect of AR at this stage?

Fricken 7y ago

This is my favorite augmented reality game: https://youtu.be/8t4pmlHRokg https://youtu.be/8t4pmlHRokg

hyperpallium 7y ago

Sorry! This version of Minecraft requires a keyboard. Please try again on another device. But I have a bluetooth keyboard connected to my phone...