Lenovo first released its smartphone-powered Mirage AR headset last year alongside its sole title, Star Wars: Jedi Challenges (2018), a collection of short AR games that let you do things like fight Darth Vader & Co. with a lightsaber-shaped controller, play HoloChess, and challenge the Empire in a tabletop RTS. Now, Lenovo is returning with a new AR game, MARVEL Dimension of Heroes, and a pair of 6DOF controllers too.
Mirage AR’s new Marvel title is said to let you jump into the boots of six super heroes—Doctor Strange, Captain America, Thor, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Star-Lord—and battle against super villains in an original story.
Besides saving the world in story mode, the game also boasts a wave-based survival mode (online leaderboards included), and an admittedly pretty intriguing local co-op mode, which lets two Mirage AR users connect to the same Wi-Fi network and duke it out side-by-side against the game’s super villains, Loki, Ronan the Accuser, Ultron Prime, and the Winter Soldier.
In addition, the new bundle will also include a pair of what Lenovo is calling its ‘Universal Controllers’, two wireless 6DOF controllers that will let you use both hands to punch, slice and blast away.
Like last year’s bundle, the system also comes with an external tracking beacon, which helps provide stable 6DOF tracking for the headset, and both its Universal Controllers and previously bundled lightsaber controller.
Lenovo is selling its MARVEL Dimension of Heroes AR headset bundle for $250 in the US starting today on Amazon.com and Lenovo.com.
Users who own the new bundle will also be able to play Star Wars: Jedi Challenges, ostensibly using one of the tracked Universal Controllers as a substitute lightsaber.
Marvel Dimension of Heroes is a free download for iOS and Android. The headset itself supports a wide array of flagship phones including: iPhone X series, iPhone 8/Plus, iPhone 7/Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 6 series, Samsung Galaxy S9, S8, S7 series, Google Pixel XL, Google Pixel, Moto Z2 Force, Moto Z, LG G6. Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro, Nova 2S, Xiaomi MIX2, Sony Xperia XZ1.
Although we haven’t seen a separate store listing for Universal Controllers yet, Lenovo maintains that they will be purchasable through its website at some point. Considering however that the original Star Wars bundle now costs $50 on Amazon (originally priced at $200), we’ll be interested to see how the company intends on pricing its controllers, which despite the name, are entirely locked into the Mirage AR platform.
While it’s clear Lenovo Mirage AR isn’t a traditional hardware platform as such—it only has two games for now—it’s good to see that the company hasn’t abandoned it entirely, which would have placed it more abruptly in the ‘expensive gimmick’ territory I mentioned last year.
Now that it has two 6DOF controllers, it would be interesting to see whether Lenovo decides to open Mirage AR up to more developers looking to create for what could be an augmented reality Cardboard platform in the making, or whether it continues on as a two-trick pony.