Your face is a warzone in new ‘AR’ app

It's one thing to look in the mirror and see a couple of pimples on your face, but imagine popping alien eggs to prevent them from hatching on your cheeks, nose and chin.

This is the silly premise behind SkinVaders, a new game that takes advantage of the cameras on the iPad 2, iPhone (3GS/4G/4GS) or fourth-generation iPod touch.

The free app uses "augmented reality" technology, where a camera captures a live view of the real, physical world — in this case, your face -- but the scene will be augmented with virtual, onscreen objects (i.e. aliens).

iPad 2 gamers can play with a friend or family member by using the tablet's rear-facing camera -- or you can play by yourself using the front-facing camera. Before the game starts you'll first calibrate the playfield by lining up your face (or someone else's) against the onscreen cutout. This is only required once, unless the person on the screen moves their head too much while playing.

The first level has a blue alien who appears to be crawling over the live face. To gain points, you'll tap the screen only when the creature temporarily turns green, plus you can pop green bubbles for a bonus. This mischievous E.T. will also pull skin and sneeze goo all over the place. At the end of the level, your face will have alien eyes superimposed on top of your own and you'll have the option to save or share the funny photos taken during the level.

The remainder of the nine levels shows a hole in your forehead, with an alien inside and near your brain, and you must protect it by popping multi-coloured eggs that appear on your face — and do it fast enough to prevent hatching. You can wait a little while with blue and green eggs, but yellow ones hatch quickly and purple ones need to be tapped more than once to be destroyed. Tap the large bubble to blow up a bunch of aliens in one shot.

If the eggs hatch, you'll see little aliens appear and your health will quickly deteriorate until you tap to squash them. Every successive level adds more eggs to tap, such as 50 instead of 20. The final ninth level has you tap as many eggs as you can before your health drops down to zero. Oddly, while I would stay alive for almost 10 minutes, netting a score of 80,000 or so and destroying more than 500 eggs, I'd see a message that says "Oops…try again." We inquired about this issue and were told it might be a software bug that will likely be fixed by the time you read this.

Aside from this glitch and the fact it's over too quickly, SkinVaders is entertaining and free, and a good way for kids (and kids at heart) to enjoy augmented reality technology. Hopefully the game makers will add more levels to extend the alien-popping fun.