As the future of technology continues to give us plenty of things we wish it hadn’t, we’re still managing to get some simple pleasures out of the way.
Star Wars Holochess can now be played on the iPhone in your pocket in full augmented reality glory. The game may have only occupied a few seconds of screen time, but the familiar outlandishness of the concept resonated with fans.
The news means you no longer need Lenovo’s AR headset to operate the game within the Star Wars: Jedi Challenges mobile app on iOS. (The app is also available from the Google Play Store, but no dice on ARCore support quite yet.)
Lenovo’s Mirage headset is a tad complicated to get running with — it requires a sort of tracking beacon in order to anchor things to the real world. That being said, the hardware is fairly good and the content is surprisingly solid for a branded app. With ARKit support, Apple’s augmented reality platform simplifies things quite a bit for users and brings people to the app without having to buy hardware.
There’s still a lot more you can only play with in the headset, but Lenovo says there’s about 2-3 hours of gameplay in Holochess alone, which is about the length of time I’ve casually spent in ARCore experiences to begin with, so that’s worth something.