Ghoulish camera phone game wins Nokia top gong

ROME, Italy - Earlier this week we brought you the full lowdown on the ten shortlisted developer finalists competing in the Nokia Games Innovation Challenge. The winners were announced at the Nokia Games Summit in Rome, with the most innovative game concept snatching the number one slot thanks to some clever camera tech trickery based on a principle dubbed Augmented Reality - an idea we reported on that’s currently also being explored at the Nokia Research Center.

The core concept of Augmented reality is to use your phone’s camera to capture information about ‘real-life’ objects. So find out which developer ran with this idea for the purpose of fun to land first place…

Swedish-based developers, A Different Game, were awarded first place and 40,000 Euros for their game Ghostwire - an adventure that focusses on using the unique features of your mobile phone to communicate with ghosts. The most innovative application being the use of the phone camera, where the player scans the real world through the screen viewfinder to hunt for ghosts, rooted in the concept of Augmented Reality.

Maarten Noyons, head of the Mobile Games Innovation Challenge judging panel and founder and general manager of the International Mobile Gaming Awards (IMGA) had this to say about it:

“This is a refreshing game that is truly ‘made-for-mobile’, using augmented reality in a different way. Your mobile phone helps you to discover and actually see a hidden world of mysteries and ghosts, to communicate with them, to collect them and to, as the makers state, give them peace. All judges agreed that this is a game they’d like to see progress.”

Second place and 20,000 Euros went to Melokey, with third place going to Watchers (one of the games we highlighted earlier this week because it cleverly uses GPS and Nokia Maps).

We’ll be bringing you some videos from the winning entries shortly, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, what do you think about the Ghostwire concept? Jot down your thoughts below.

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• Video: Under the shroud of Nokia Games Innovation winner Ghostwire
• Nokia Games Summit showcases Nokia Maps gaming concept and loads more!
• More mould-smashing mobile gaming innovators on film

Tags | augmented reality, camera, conversations, games summit, ghostwire, melokey, mobile innovation, Nokia, NRC, research, watchers