Vampire hunters suck new blood out of Bram Stoker’s legacy
Appropriately, the game, Bram Stoker’s Vampires, was launched during the inaugural Bram Stoker festival in Dublin last week. The company aims to create an army of vampire hunters in the capital for Halloween but, within a year or so, Haunted Planet founder and director Mads Haahr wants to see the Dracula search go global.
The game, one of two produced by Haunted Planet on foot of several years of research, is a location-based augmented reality game which casts players as ghost or vampire hunters, and allows them to use their phones as paranormal detection devices.
According to Dr Haahr, the aim of the company has been to reinvent the traditional ghost story using modern technology.
“While most smartphone games expect players to engage with a game world confined to a tiny screen, Haunted Planet sets the game in the real world and overlays all game content using augmented reality not only in visuals but also in audio.”
The Bram Stoker’s Vampires game sees users take a tour of places in Dublin the author frequented, while also seeking Dracula and his minions.
“The best play experience for this app will be in Dublin city centre in the places the writer visited, but the game can adapt itself to any location and can be used anywhere in the world,’’ explains Dr Haahr.
Supported by Enterprise Ireland, which provided €50,000 from the Competitive Start Fund earlier this year, Haunted Planet has perfected the technology and is exploring its market options.
Its first game is now being used for ghost hunting in a haunted theme park in the US, while Dracula has just been made available for free download.
The creation of this type of app was made possible in 2008 by the arrival of the smartphone. “It’s technically sophisticated, uses the handset’s camera, GPS compass, and sensors and audio to offer a highly immersive experience,” says Dr Haahr.
A computer science lecturer in Trinity College Dublin, Dr Haahr originally had the idea for this type of game in the early 2000s but the technology wasn’t there.
In 2008, he led a research project into locative media technology funded by the National Digital Research Centre in Dublin as part of its Catalyser programme. He subsequently licensed the technology and set up Haunted Planet Studios to commercialise it. Cutting back on his lecturing hours to concentrate on the company, he has since employed three full-time and four part-time staff.
The first ghost-hunting game was tested at Falkland Palace in Scotland in 2010. Since then, R&D has been ongoing. “It was hard to scale the original model — we needed to reduce the cost of producing the games and to make the games platform independent,’’
This summer, the company had its second market trial, launching a pirate ghost hunt game at the Pirates of Emerson Haunted Theme Park in California.
Haunted Planet aims to create a range of different games and to continue to enhance the features. The company hasn’t chosen a revenue model yet but is looking at the option of charging per app or per game within the app.
“We are now looking at making the platform more widely available and are looking at potential markets which include haunted theme parks in the US. We could white-label the games and sell them to theme parks,” Dr Haahr says, adding that the company is in the process of raising seed funding.
The company sees long-term possibilities to use the technology for other games.
“There are a couple of titles in this space, but Haunted Planet is different because of the focus on storytelling,” Dr Haahr adds.
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