Ents Inc – Chaos Karts

Augmenting the go-kart experience

Go-karting has been popular for many years but they are hard designed into one physical space, whether indoors or outdoors. Ents Inc had an idea – creating a real-life video game, by combining the racing with augmented reality.

To turn this into a reality, Ents Inc came to us to build out an initial prototype to get funding for the fully-fledged experience, which has now blossomed into location-based entertainment in Manchester and Dubai.

Building a real-life video game

The vision was to recreate familiar console-based karting games in the physical world, complete with a library of tracks, and powerups for players to sabotage each other with. Turning a high-octane virtual game into a real one and doing it safely would be no simple task.

Many of the details are covered by NDA but, as you might imagine, there were many complex moving parts to connect together.

From the booking system information being relayed to the go-karts, determining screen information to be shown about each player in each session, to the projection, tracking and location systems that match the go-kart real world position to the virtual game world being augmented over the open, empty space – each had to integrate seamlessly for the ultimate immersive go-karting game.

This blend of technology allows the fun aspects to operate, such as knowing when a racer has gone over a powerup weapon pickup and deployed it against another racer. But it’s also vital for safety, tracking when racers are headed for a collision to slow or stop the go-karts, as well as maintaining a fair race by stopping cheating from cutting virtual corners.

Alongside Ents Inc, we also worked with suppliers such as Panasonic which provided the projectors to create the tracks, and 7^th Sense for its media server bringing the content to life. The Make Real team developed the software that weaved all the necessary hardware together into an incredible immersive experience.

Karting all over the world

Chaos Karts saw its first proof-of-concept deployment in London in 2021. In 2023, it launched as a full location-based entertainment game in Manchester, with another location following in Dubai in 2024.

It’s picked up plenty of attention with the likes of Blooloop, LADBible, Yahoo News, The Manc, and other publications covering the attraction. Reviews of the experience are super positive about the karting.

Of course, because the tracks themselves are virtual and displayed via projection mapping, there are potentially an infinite number of tracks that players can speed around, with four new tracks already added. We can’t wait to see what the future holds!