Who knew stacking one coloured block on top of another could be so incredibly fun?
Well, Yuma Soerianto, Let’s Stack AR!’s 10-year-old Australian developer did, so he went ahead and built a game. Because that’s what you do when you’re a sparky junior developer with a bright idea (he’s been building apps and games since he was six – yes, the mind boggles!).
Inspiration and creation
Yuma was a guest of honour at Apple’s annual WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) earlier this year where he met Tim Cook, who Yuma describes as “my inspiration!”. The experiences he had at the conference – learning about the iOS ARKit framework (used for making AR apps and games) and speaking to the Apple engineers, spurred him on to develop Let’s Stack AR! – the AR version of his original Let’s Stack game.
The self-taught developer whizz-kid set to work on the game when he returned to his home city of Melbourne, spending a couple of hours on coding each night after school, and within three months had it ready for launch.
The game
Let’s Stack AR! isn’t just any old building block challenge, with the power of AR, the game lets you build your stack anywhere – in your living room, in the garden, on even on the beach. What’s more, you can compare the height of your stack to real-world objects and landmarks, as Yuma explains: "It’s cool to get a sense of size when you're playing.”
As you put your stacking skills to the test, try to align your blocks perfectly, or they’ll get narrower and narrower and more and more difficult to stack. But when you get the knack of it, you’ll see your stacks grow from the height of a meagre BBQ grill (1m), to Yuma’s own height (1.4m), then as tall as a lofty NBA player (2m) and beyond to the heights of world landmarks like the Sydney Harbour Bridge (134m) and the Eiffel Tower (342m).
To build the object height database, Yuma got very hands-on with the shorter stuff. “It was actually difficult to find a database of object heights, so I ended up going to IKEA to measure the objects there!”, he tells us.
For those wondering what the top altitude of the game is, Yuma explains, “There is no limit to how tall you can stack, but the tallest object you can compare to in the game is Mount Everest (I would be surprised if anyone reaches it!).” – That sounds like a challenge to us.
So, how high can you go?…