Augmented Reality Game Ran on a 2007 Nokia Phone

Even though Nokia's golden days are long gone and its products are usually remembered with a nostalgic smile and rarely as a viable alternative to iPhones and Samsungs, there are still savvy tinkerers who push our childhood phones and their operating systems to their limits, even running modern programs on them. One such handyman, whose projects we can never get enough of, is Dante Leoncini, who recently took a break from his work with Whisk3D, formerly known as Blendersito, to achieve yet another incredible feat: booting up an augmented reality game on a 17-year-old Nokia N95.

Powered by the 2007 phone's Symbian OS and 64 MB of RAM, the game was originally developed by Sergey Ten for the now-defunct Cellagames website and uses old-school AR cards similar to those in Invizimals, a legendary title some PSP owners over the age of 20 will fondly remember.

According to the author, the game runs surprisingly smoothly when the age of the hardware and software are taken into account. Moving forward, Dante plans to combine the app with Whisk3D's capabilities to explore whether it's possible to display 3D models in AR on a Nokia phone.

For those unaware, Whisk3D (original name Blendersito) is Dante's Symbian-powered version of Blender, which he has been developing since late 2022. The app allows users to upload and model 3D characters on the phone, design game level assets, extrude vertices and edges, create planes, and even connect the phone to a monitor and keyboard for more convenient use.

In a true Blender fashion, Dante's Whisk3D is open-source and can be accessed via the creator's GitHub page. You can also support Dante here and check out more jaw-dropping experiments with Nokia-ran Blender over here.

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