HiGame

I’ve demoed a lot of smartphone-based, augmented reality (AR) headsets, and while they’ve always seemed to have potential, nothing about them was very compelling. Lenovo and Disney are working to change that this holiday season with a well-thought-out game based on Star Wars, called Jedi Challenges. There are quite a few cute AR games now, but most of them rely just on your phone’s display, so they’re hardly immersive. Star Wars: Jedi Challenges ($199.99) (See it on BestBuy.com) goes quite a bit beyond that.

Leveraging Disney’s expertise in entertainment, and Lenovo’s inexpensive-but-clever Mirage AR headset, the game does a good job of making you believe you are interacting with holographic objects. The crowning touch, though, is the AR light saber. You control it by using a physical light saber handle, modeled after the ones in the movies. The cameras built-in to Lenovo’s Mirage AR headset track it and provide the deadly beam of energy Star Wars fans have come to know and love.

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