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As video games have become more and more realistic over the past few decades, we are quickly approaching the dream of the movie Tron: to be able to actually physically exist within our games, to bring a new level of immediacy to the act of playing.

Improvements in graphics have made this partly possible; innovative systems like the Oculus Rift gaming headset, which you wear over your eyes to plunge yourself into those graphics, have inched us even closer. But with the Oculus Rift, you still have to be sitting down as your character moves, so you don't get the full out-of-body experience you might want with virtual reality.

A wild new concept from developer Aaron Rasmussen appears to take this idea to the next level. It's called Atlas, and it uses Oculus Rift, an iPhone and motion tracking sensors to allow you to insert yourself into the game you are playing, mapping the environment of a video game into the physical space you are inhabiting.

So, for example, you can turn a basketball court into a war zone, or your living room into Super Mario World. Wherever you walk in the real world, your character walks in the game; and looking through the lens of Rift, you sense that you really are the character moving about in the level.

This is heady stuff. Here's Rasmussen's Kickstarter pitch video, which shows in some detail how the system works and what it would be like to "play" in your own home:

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