With few exceptions it’s never a good idea to spray graffiti over your neighbour’s house and compete with your friends to become the neighbourhood graffiti king. Nether the less I have the bug, and this morning decided to add my ‘tag’ to my hotel room in Santa Clara.

Fortunately for the hotel the tag I left was a virtual tag courtesy of the new augmented reality game for the iPhone titled TagDis from e23games.

In TagDis you earn points by leaving your tags at any location, if you are the first person to drop a tag in an area you become the king and the owner of the territory. You earn points for dropping tags and by getting others to view your tags, but be warned, others can take over your territory by dropping their own tags in your area and getting more views. Unchecked you can loose your kingdoms so to protect your assets, you can team up with friends for protection or to take over nearby territories and make them your own. All the fun of urban graffiti without the risk of being beaten by rival gangs or arrested.

The tags you leave can be simple text messages, or even complex works of art. If you’re an accomplished artist you can draw free hand, if not you can use one of the available stencils to complete your artwork.

The game is an interesting mix of augmented reality for viewing tags and geo-location for seeing your territory. There is a perverse sense of self satisfaction knowing that you have left your mark somewhere and it can only be found using augmented reality. Currently I own the Avatar Hotel, the next guy that gets my room will have no idea that floating just above the bed is a… well that would be telling.

Since there the Avatar Hotel is the hotel of choice for delegates to ARE2010, I’m sure there will be a number of challengers to my kingdom over the next few days. It’s surprising how territorial I feel.

TagDis is surprisingly good fun, it’s free and can be downloaded from the appstore. Just search for TagDis or use the Microsoft Tag reader to scan the image below.

TagDis

Scan with the Microsoft Tag reader to get TagDis.

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