A shared, persistent experience. Talking about the metaverse doesn’t just mean discussing a trendy word, one buzzword as the English speakers would say. It also means imagining, net of corporate and personal interests, what it might mean to inhabit a persistent digital world, in which each of us is able to leave a visible mark to other users. A world in which everything happens simultaneously for everyone, in a shared virtual space. What if this space were our world, the cities we live in, the streets we travel?
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Augmented reality meets the real world
That’s the idea behind Lightship VPS, a project launched during the developer conference by Niantic, the company that developed, among others, Pokemon Goone of the most popular smartphone games in the world, and the newborn Peridot. In essence, the company led by John Hanke built an augmented reality map of the world. The users helped it, as always happens in these cases, by framing the places of their cities in search of Pokemon and thus providing the data necessary for the mapping of physical spaces.
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Now, the company makes this technology available to developers, which allows them to place augmented reality experiences in physical spaces. The objects will be persistent, a fundamental characteristic of the metaverse: they will remain in the place where the creator of the experience decided to place them. Let’s imagine we want to create an application that includes a game around the Colosseum in Rome. Lightship Vps, in its intentions, will allow developers to do this. And when the players find themselves near the chosen place, the system will be able to understand, on the basis of a series of spatial signals, where they are and then return them the experiences expected in that space.
“The real promise of augmented reality – said Niantic CEO John Hanke – is the opportunity to bring the real world closer to the digital one. Allowing our virtual creations to inhabit physical space. For this we need a system that is able to map the surrounding space, to transform it into data. And that’s exactly what we do with Lightship VPS ”.
There are already dedicated applications, which tell the potential of this tool in the hands of developers. Like JR Reality, a feature of the application of the Super Blue museum in Miami wanted by the artist JR, which invites users to leave a digital “portrait or a memory” around the cities of the world. Anyone who uses that application will be able to see what others have done, in a sort of collective work of art. Or, again, StoryTrails, an application that allows, once you have framed particular places in London, to experience the stories of those spaces in augmented reality.
Lightship Vps is available in approximately 20,000 locations around the world, with a particular focus on San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, New York, Tokyo and Seattle. More than 1,000 cities are expected to land by the end of the year.
Towards the metaverse of the real world: from LIghtship to 8th Wall
It is an effort, that of Niantic towards the metaverse of the real world, which starts from afar. Last November, the company had launched Lightship, a platform that allows developers to program games or applications of any kind starting from the set of tools and technologies developed in recent years (we talked about it here). Along with Lightship, Niantic has also invested in integrating AR into websites. It did so through its 8th Wall, a suite that allows you to build small augmented reality experiences, to be placed within web platforms, without the need to develop dedicated apps.
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During the conference, CEO John Hanke also announced the arrival of Campfire, a social network that, starting from a map, allows you to see people, events, communities and messaging. A space where you can discover other users in your area, exchange messages with them and share content, organize events and meetings. “The homepage of the metaverse of the real world,” Niantic defines it.