Now You Can Let The Wookie Win With Real Life Holo-Chess

Disney and Lucasfilm are teaming with Advanced Development to bring Star Wars themed augmented reality experiences to life, including the opportunity to wield a lightsaber or play holochess, the hologram chess game seen in Star Wars: A New Hope and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

"AR has always been a big part of the Star Wars stories going back all the way to the beginning," said Mike Goslin, VP Advanced Development, during a video game presentation at Disney's D23 Expo. "In A New Hope, Princess Leia appears early on as a hologram all the way up to The Force Awakens, where they have the galaxy maps and the Starkiller Base.

"My personal favorite is the holochess game on the Millennium Falcon, with the little monsters… We've always wanted to recreate that game, but the technology hasn't existed to do that, until now."

Gosling demonstrated a Lenovo-designed headset in sync with a smartphone equipped with the required app, which allows the wearer to see and interact with multiple Star Wars situations. In addition to holochess — which you should avoid playing with Wookies, unless you throw the game — Star Wars: Jedi Challenges will allow you to pick up a lightsaber peripheral (as seen in the video), and do your best Jedi Knight impersonation. (No word yet if you'll have to supply your own lightsaber mouth noises.)

The app is simply "coming soon" to the Lenovo website and Best Buy stores, but anxious fans can visit the official Jedi Challenges website to sign up for notifications. The new app-enabled augmented reality experience will likely be made available around the holiday shopping season, alongside the release of Disney and Lucasfilm's Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Jedi Challenges isn't Disney's only commitment to the ever-growing virtual reality phenomenon: we recently learned a new virtual reality experience, Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, will be open to guests at Disneyland's Downtown Disney (California) and Walt Disney World's Disney Springs (Florida) this holiday season.

Announced by the official Star Wars website, the attraction will "allow fans to move freely in an untethered, social, and multi-sensory experience, including interaction with friends, fans, and Star Wars characters."

With all this top shelf technology, it's only a matter of time before you get to power up a Marksman-H combat remote (the floating ball thingy that Luke Skywalker used to train with in A New Hope) and develop your Force and lightsaber skills, padawan. Even better: virtual reality lightsaber battles, pitting your Jedi skills against the galaxy's most vicious villains, like Darth Maul and Darth Vader. Christmas (or Life Day) will be a lot more fun with friendly games of holochess — as long as you're not playing under the threat of having your arms ripped off by a sore loser Wookie.

The Last Jedi will hit theaters on December 15.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the second film in the new Star Wars sequel trilogy that began with Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015. The film will deal with Luke training Rey to become a, and possibly the last, Jedi. Meanwhile, the Resistance, including Poe Dameron and First Order defector Finn, continues to fight against the First Order, led by General Hux, while Supreme Leader Snoke and his Dark Side follower Kylo Ren continue their mysterious plot.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is written and directed by Rian Johnson and stars Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Andy Serkis, Benicio Del Toro, Laura Dern, and Kelly Marie Tran.