Navneet Smartbooks: Decent AR gaming, but leaves a spacious room for improvements

Navneet Education recently announced a new series of Smartbooks under a new brand, Youva. The brand aims at gaining traction in the younger age group of consumers who follow technology and gaming. The Smartbooks include an AR sticker on the front cover of the Smartbook, facilitating the AR detection.

Navneet has published Youva app in the Play Store , and consumers can download and install the app. Currently, the Smartbook allows users to scan the different covers with racing cars printed on the front covers and use those cars to race the car on an AR track. The UI introduced in the app is pretty barebones without any additional settings or tweaks.

Youva app

The app is a 125MB download from the Play Store with nothing remarkable about the package. When you launch the app, you are greeted with a splash screen of Youva and Navneet and brought to the landing page. Once on the landing page, the left side of the page shows ‘LEADER BOARD’ and the right side shows your name and settings toggle with a large red button to “STA RT»”. When you take on the large red button, it opens the camera app to scan the Smartbook with on-screen instructions reading “Place your Youva Smartbook here.”

The “Settings” menu has on-screen options to mute the game, send suggestions to Navneet via e-mail, legal info, credits, games, missions (with detailed mission information) and a logout button. The game allows Google Play Game framework to save your progress across devices.

The issue with the game is that you would assume that a 125MB download will include all the files necessary for the VR game. But, that is not the case, and whenever you scan a new Smartbook, the app kicks back to downloading the car and in-game resources related to that car. With the core target audience of the Smartbooks being school going students, you can’t expect them to carry smartphones to classrooms to play using the Smartbooks or use the internet to download the game each time there is a new Smartbook cover.

The entire idea of downloading every time is further negated when the download varies from 150 to 250MB per car. During the testing, I have scanned two smartbooks and the app has downloaded about 550MB which is 425MB more than the base apk from the Google Play store. You can’t expect school children with limited mobile Internet to invest this much data in the game. Instead, the developers could have offered all the games as a base download at once and allow users to unlock the vehicles on scanning them using the camera interface.

Experience

After moving away from the entire download problem, playing the game has some problems, the in-game VR experience is magnified, and you need considerable physical space to view and look around using your smartphone. Even though the technology relied on keeping the Smartbook within the camera, it becomes tough to play a 360-degree game on a plane surface while maintaining the Smartbook within the camera field. To keep that, you need to keep walking around the Smartbook while ensuring that it is on the same plane or at least rotate it using your hands.

The game also keeps on disappearing and is a bit shaky at times. There is no multiplayer mode to enjoy this with your friends. There is no option to zoom into the game environment, which makes it difficult to be played in a more limited room like coaching classes or classrooms or wherever the game is intended to be played. However, the entire VR environment and the graphics are good and more complex if compared with other AR games like the Pokemon GO.

Verdict

The selection of different cars on front covers is a great way to drive up sales, and the selection of cars is great too. But the main issue here is not the idea itself but rather the technical execution. There should be an overhaul of the downloading mechanism along with a revamp of settings during the game-play to zoom-out of the environment of the game. Apart from that, the game is overall a decent attempt at AR games. Even though educational institutions like schools may ban smartphones, which makes it sort of ideal for college students, but I doubt it would be a major crowd puller in colleges.