Electronic Arts invites players from The Sims Freeplay and their friends to visit their Sims' homes in Augmented Reality with a new AR mode that supports multiplayer and persistent content with ARKit 2.0.
Available in the Brilliant Backyards update for ARKit-compatible iPhones and iPads, the new AR feature allows players to see their Sims' home in their physical space and look at the dollhouse model from different angles in the normal Touchscreen mode are not available. With ARKit 2.0 players can also invite friends to help build the house and save the AR environment for later games.
To begin, players activate the AR mode via the green button on their home screen and start new AR house lot. After searching for a field to anchor the home and placing the virtual structure, the player taps "Save AR Space" to set the location.
From there, players can customize the home in Build Mode with all the items unlocked in the app to place it for free. Likewise, any available Sims or pets can be invited into the house to do the things they would normally do in the game.
To return to a saved house location, players select the virtual home from the AR Spaces menu and then point to Camera to the real room that corresponds to the stored saved state snapshot.
For multiplayer mode the host of the game Starts the session by clicking the multiplayer "tap. Guests access via the "Search" button at the bottom of the "AR Spaces" menu. To merge sessions, the guest must first be near the host. As soon as the host appears beneath the available rooms, guests tap "Connect" and point their camera view at the host's virtual home, with a snapshot of the available space.
There are some reservations about AR mode and multiplayer sessions. Players can not sell items in AR mode or put them back in standard game mode, and players can not collect resources, earn experience points, or progress through active AR quests. Additionally, guests can not interact with host sims or bring their own sims to the party, and certain Ultimate Makeover and Have a Birthday games are not available in AR mode.
The latest ARKit features, namely multiplayer support, persistent content and object recognition, are a bit sluggish Since its launch, it has been a welcome development for Apple to have a major publisher like EA update own a title from one of its major franchises for the latest features of the toolkit.
On the other hand, EA opts for Apple's closed-garden multiplayer AR a hit against Cloud Anchors, Google's multiplayer cross-platform flavor, available through ARCore.