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Universal announced Jurassic World Affiliate product: A Pokémon Go-style AR app called DinoTracker. It allows players to interact with recently released dinosaurs Dominate film and collect small facts about their real-life counterparts.
The premise of the app is pretty simple: Using their phone’s camera, players can “track” the dinosaur tracks in the world around them. When they find the dinosaur – out of 10 prehistoric characters to find – they can feed them with their hands. Developed by Trigger XR, the game uses Niantic’s Lightship ARDK to recognize different surfaces and spaces and map the properly sized dinosaur to the space around the user.
GamesBeat spoke with Jason Yim, CEO of Trigger XR, about the app. He notes that Lightship’s features allow dinosaurs to interact with the environment, in a sense. “Usually AR always comes as the top layer, which breaks reliability. Now, with object occlusion, you can see a magpie emerge from behind a tree or hide behind objects in the sky. That adds a huge amount to the consumer feeling that it’s really there. Dinosaurs can also follow the user with their heads and will become aggressive if they get too close.
This is not the first time an app tied to Jurassic World uses AR technology to try to bring dinosaurs into the real world – 2018 Jurassic World Alive debuted around the release of the movie Fallen Kingdom. That game is more inspired by Pokémon Go than Dinotracker.
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