National Digital Technology Centre

Our featured tech start-up this week is Haunted Planet, a new digital venture in other words creating location-based augmented reality smartphone games to immerse gamers into the eerie world of ghosts!

The brainchild of Mads Haahr

Haunted Planet is the brainchild of Mads Haahr, a computer scientist who was formerly a computer science lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. The start-up is now based at the National Digital Technology Centre in Dublin City.During Haunted Planet came to fruition in 2010, Haahr says that the initial idea for the venture was spawned back around 2004 or 2005 during he was tutoring a PhD student at TDC who was working on a location-aware project at that time."It was only in 2008 when smartphone innovation became mature enough that we started as a matter of fact experimenting with the game concept," he says..Haahr signed up for the Catalyser programme at the NDRC in 2008. "I think we were possibly the very first Catalyser project. Our project ran from 2008 to 2010, and in 2011 the company took over the development of the innovation." Interestingly, Haunted Planet is as well one of the first spin-outs from the NDRC. Right now, the team is quite small, he says. "There are two people working full time and three people who come in on a part-time basis. We're looking to grow while 2012, although."

So here's a little bit more about Haunted Planet and its approach to location-based gaming using augmented reality. According to Haahr, the start-up has spent a lot of time polishing its innovation and perfecting the gameplay.

Incredibly evocative experience

"We now have an incredibly evocative experience," he says. "When people talk about augmented reality, they mostly think of visual overlays and often forget about audio. We've spent a lot of time on our visuals however also on creating innovation to drive the audio side of the augmented reality experience. The net result is that people in effect get immersed in our games." So it's all about achieving flow at the time? "We think of our games as a reinvention of the traditional ghost story, and ghost stories are all about blurring the boundary between the real world and the story world," says Haahr.

And did the team encounter any start-up challenges at the beginning? "Lots! I wouldn't even know where to begin," explains Haahr. "I would say Ireland is a as a matter of fact good place to start a business, even though. There's much less red tape here than in any other country I'm familiar with."

And his advice for other aspiring self-starters out there? "Go for it! I'm familiar with the tech entrepreneur community in Dublin, and it's incredibly vibrant in a very grassroots kind of way. There are so many people with interesting ideas, building cool things and turning them into businesses," says Haahr. "If you're running a tech start-up, do engage with the community. People are in the extreme passionate, and they're helping each other and sharing their experiences to everyone's benefit. It's actually very exciting," he concludes.