Angry Birds: You can now play your favourite mobile game in augmented and virtual reality

Rovio is experimenting with the gaming of the future 
Amelia Heathman19 December 2018

Angry Birds is back and this time it’s in mixed reality.

Rovio Entertainment, the creators of the popular mobile game, has reimagined Angry Birds in different formats: one in virtual reality and one in augmented reality.

“One of our strategic areas is to look at the future of gaming – so what are the devices people are going to be playing on five and 10 years from now,” Rovio’s CMO Ville Heijari told the Standard. “Augmented reality, mixed reality and spatial computing, it’s very interesting to us.”

Augmented reality versus virtual reality


Augmented reality: technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world 

Virtual reality: a computer-generated simulation of a 3D image or environment that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way, facilitated by a helmet with a screen inside

Earlier this year, Rovio partnered with AR hardware company Magic Leap to create one of the first games for its AR headset, named Magic Leap One. The game, Angry Birds: FPS (short for First Person Slingshot) lets you topple down the pigs in majestic structures built on a table in front of you, using a life-size slingshot and those colourful birds.

It’s relatively easy to put the headset on and get going, and the One controller as the slingshot is intuitive to use. There are a total of 28 levels to get through and you can replay them from different angles so it never gets boring.

Angry Birds: FPS is built for the Magic Leap One AR headset
Rovio Entertainment

However, it’s not the most accessible form of gaming. The Magic Leap One headsets are only available in North America at the moment and cost over $2,000 so unless you end up in a demo, it’s unlikely you’ll be playing this game anytime soon.

“For Rovio, it was about the platform and doing something completely new. While the platform is quite exclusive, we feel that we’re breaking new ground in developing for this and it gives us a good base to continue developing on different VR and AR devices as well,” explained Heijari.

That brings us to Rovio’s latest game: Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs. Announced today, the VR game will debut in early 2019 and will whisk players away to a remote island to take on those infamous pigs.

For the VR and AR versions of Angry Birds, Rovio teamed up with fellow Nordic games company Resolution Games to create the new instalments in the Angry Birds franchise.

“From our point of view, it was such a great fit,” said Tommy Palm, CEO of Resolution Games. “Angry Birds was one of the first real big hits on touchscreen, it was super accessible and a lot of people understood what to do and had fun playing the game.”

Creating a game in VR isn’t too dissimilar to creating a game in AR. In fact, Resolution developed Angry Birds: FPS in VR at first, because the Magic Leap One headset wasn’t ready until the end of the summer.

There are benefits to AR gaming too. For one, Palm explains that the cyber sickness some people experience in VR isn’t as much of an issue in an augmented game because you can still see the world around you when you wear an AR headset.

The success of transplanting games into mixed reality really depends on the content, something that Angry Bird excels in. “It’s a brand that has been around for a long time, so the concept of the blocks and the characters work really well in both AR and VR,” said Palm. “They’re funny, quirky and have a lot of fun animations.”

Look out for Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs on different VR gaming platforms from early next year. As for playing games like Angry Birds in AR? Heijari likens the first AR headsets to the early days of touchscreen smartphones.

“The first touchscreen smartphones back in 2007 were really high priced and had limited use. Our view is that these platforms will keep evolving and changing and we’re keeping at the forefront of what mobile gaming will look like in the future.”

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