The DeanBeat: Console games on the couch and augmented reality entertainment everywhere

Some of the best moments I’ve had playing games lately involve sitting on the couch and assuming the identity of Aloy, the female hero of Guerrilla Games’ beautiful PlayStation 4 game, Horizon Zero Dawn. I could spend a lot more evenings lurking through forests and using a bow to take down fearsome dinosaur-like machines that have taken over the post-apocalyptic Earth.

And then, this week, I saw Mark Zuckerberg get up on stage at the F8 developer conference in San Jose, Calif., and show his vision for augmented reality games that will come for to smartphones starting this fall. Zuckerberg’s games were crude, but cute animations overlaid on the real world, just like the bunny ears that you paste on your face using social tools like Snapchat. This thing that seems so simplistic today could one day be “one of the great transformational technologies of the next 50 years,” according to Mike Abrash, chief scientist at Oculus.