If you've ever found yourself watching the HoloChess scene from Star Wars and hankering to play it yourself, a new game for HoloLens might satisfy that urge. Described as a mix of chess, board games, and card games, HoloGrid: Monster Battle leverages HoloLens' mixed reality prowess to bring the game to life.
In HoloGrid: Monster Battle, you strategically do battle with monsters on a virtual board. The gameplay itself is intended to work like a Hearthstone battle, but on a chess board.
Leveraging the HoloLens platform's core mixed reality technologies: spatial mapping and spatial sound, gaze tracking, gesture input, and voice control; the HoloLens version of HoloGrid: Monster Battle "reads' the player's environment, and then allows them to place and scale the board and characters into the real world accurately.
The game has already been available as an AR and VR game on other platforms, but HoloLens represents "the purest vision yet" for the game, says Mike Levine, founder of publisher Happy Giant. And based on footage available from the mobile version of the game, which uses physical cards to bring AR monsters to life, it looks pretty impressive already.
HoloLens is still very much a developer product, so the audience for the game is pretty small right now. But if you happen to have your hands on one of the headsets, you can pick up HoloGrid: Monster Battle from the Windows Store for $4.99.
