Facebook Launches Augmented Reality Games for Messenger Video Chat

Facebook keeps its promise to add new technologies to its platforms and offer users more interactive and meaningful interactions. Last week, the social media platform has started rolling out augmented reality games for its direct chat app, Messenger.

Video Calls with Exciting Augmented Reality Games

Messenger helps connect family members and friends from across the globe through text, audio and video chat. Now, when users initiate a video call, they will see a star icon after they tap on the video call button. Once activated, the star icon will let the users select one of the available augmented reality games and challenge their friends to play it.

Messenger currently offers two AR games:

• “Don’t Smile”, which challenges players to keep a straight face, while adding funny AR filters to their faces;
• “Asteroids Attack”, where the participants have to navigate spaceships in the outer space, among racing asteroids which try to destroy them.

However, Facebook plans to add several other exciting augmented reality games in the upcoming months. Some of the titles revealed by Facebook Newsroom are:

• “Beach Bump”, which involves passing a beach ball from one player to another; and
• “Kitten Kraze” – because everybody loves cats.

Multiplayer Possibilities

Of course, games are not very fun if they are restricted to only two players. This is why the new augmented reality games on Messenger can be played by up to 6 players. To enjoy a multiplayer game in Messenger, one user has to initiate a group video chat and then activate the star icon.

Facebook demonstrated the way a multiplayer AR game works in a short video:

All the augmented reality games available on Messenger were made possible by AR Studio, Facebook’s proprietary augmented reality platform which allows developers to create AR experience for the social media platform.

In order to enjoy the recently added augmented reality games, users must have the latest version of Messenger installed on their smartphones.