Thanks to augmented reality, you can play Super Mario Bros. in real life

Augmented reality isn’t just good for catching Pokemon in your neighborhood.

A graduate student at NYU has taken augmented reality to the next pixellated level.

Abhishek Singh has recreated the first level of the original Super Mario Bros. in completely playable augmented reality. According to Upload VR, the project took a month to create. It’s played wearing HoloLens through which the player, otherwise known as Mario, can see all the important pixellated elements from the game such as item blocks and incoming Goombas.

To see Singh demonstrate the completed game, he made a video which was filmed in New York City’s Central Park. He also went the extra mile by dressing up as Mario to truly get in character.

We must applaud the sheer thoroughness of this recreation. Everything we love about the original Mario game is there. You can jump on and squish Goombas. You can shoot fireballs at enemies with a flick of your hands. You can even kick Koopa shells out of your way. And while you can’t duck into pipes, you can fall down those tricky gaps that annoyingly caused you to lose a life if you jumped at the wrong time.

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“I also had to model all the assets and elements of the game and at times rethink the experience and gameplay to work in a real-world 3D setting,” Singh told Upload VR. “The most time was probably spent on tweaking the game to work in a large outdoor environment. It still has a few quirks but is definitely playable.”

That’s certainly true, as long as you can forget that to passersby you may just come off as a crazy person jumping and dodging at nothing.