It’s not quite Doom running on a hacked cash machine, but somebody’s managed to get the mobile version of Mojang’s Minecraft onto Google’s wearable OS.
The pervasive nature of Minecraft has seen the indie exploration hit make its way beyond PC onto the latest consoles and even into your smartphone. The concept of the game is to explore and mine the land for resources in order to build shelter and survive. It’s a simple premise, but one that has captured the attention of millions of players in recent years, not to mention its open-ended nature has helped push it to become one of the most prevalent play through titles on platforms like YouTube and Twitch.
Its port to mobile in the form of Minecraft: Pocket Edition saw tweaks to the game in order to adhere to the more limited resources of a mobile ecosystem and has been entertaining gamers on the go since early 2013. Until this point, Pocket Edition had been making a name for itself on iOS and Android, but now modder Corbin Davenport has managed to transfer the Android build of the game to Google’s wearable OS: Android Wear.
Using a Samsung Gear Live smartwatch as the test device Davenport was able to take the application’s .APK file and manually install it, most likely using the wearable’s debug capabilities.
Despite the awkwardly small 1.63-inch Super AMOLED display, the onscreen controls can still be used to near full effect. As the Samsung Gear Live features a touchscreen, Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and 512MB of RAM, its specs don’t differ dramatically from a low-end Android smartphone, which would account for the relatively simple process of porting the game over.
We weren’t given the full details to recreate this experiment on an Android Wear device of our own, but it goes to show just how capable today’s smartwatches are without the need to be tethered to a full-blown Android smartphone.
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