Will Wright recently said he believes 'personal gaming' is a major new
frontier for games, defined as games where an individual user's actual life and
surroundings tailor the experience.RJDJ's Michael Breidenbruecker, who was also
a founder at last.fm, has the same idea. His company's work began with creating
experimental sound platforms for musicians, but quickly moved into FIFA Coins using sound
for augmented reality mobile apps. RJDJ partnered
screenwriter Christopher Nolan on Inception: The App, which reached 4 million
downloads.Following that success, the FIFA 17 Coins team's begun beta testing its original
mobile game project Dimensions, which uses augmented sound to turn the world
around a player into an adventure game intended to enhance reality, not pull
focus from it onto closed experiences as games traditionally do. "When people
talk about augmented reality, they usually think it's about visuals that are put
top of the camera image," Breidenbruecker explains to Gamasutra. "It's always
a visual thing. But not many people think that the same can be done with
sound."Though Dimensions is played with headphones, the technology enhances and
manipulates nearby sound, instead of covering it over. "It's almost like you
have a hearing aid: You hear everything around you, but it's enhanced. If there
are certain noises coming in, we are analyzing them and transforming them into a
nice-
musical soundscape."Players can enter and exit different "dimensions" within
the game through their activities. Because Dimensions makes use of the phone's
hardware to detect player movement and location, different kinds of soundscape
realms become available if the player is active versus sitting still, or being
loud versus quiet. The player's behavior unlocks new dimensions -- for u2fifa example,
there's a "Ghost" dimension that can only be accessed in the hour between
midnight and
