The Nuts and Bolts of Real World AR Gaming

[Music] okay so I'm going to talk about context where location assessment so for everyone who has no clue what it is it's deep rooted in augmented reality so this is an augmented reality session we're talking about koalas like the koala bear for the ones of you who have heard me talk about the topics before I like to rage about definitions because I think today in the industry we we have so many so many things let me tell you an anecdote so we have V ra r XR n R and all the other things and we are an augmented reality tech company based in Germany doing augmented reality technologies and games on that and I get regular invites from the German government telling me Cristina could you please come as our VR expert I don't do

VR people and this is totally different but nevertheless we have a big problem out there because people mix it up all the time so let's just cover some basics so we have a real big division in the industry when it comes to augmented reality games at the moment so you see on the one hand side I think we all know it it's Pokemon go and I think lots of people of you think yeah Pokemon go yeah I've had nice try Christina this is a location-based game yes it has this one they are element but why is it actually advertised as an augmented reality game we're talking about that and we have on the other side the so-called real augmented reality games where you have a camera open and you see this epic beauty coming sitting on you on your desk or sitting on a screen and you can interact with it and yeah this is more what what things think augmented reality should be but actually I think a mixture of all of that is the truth thing a very very long

time I felt with rooting for AR as well I'm a bit the ugly 10 please sister Villar because I was treated so badly all the time no one really believed in IR and vocation based doesn't work and cetera et cetera and then there came a super-huge de pokemon totally hit off and I thought I'm not pimply anymore but that wasn't true because everyone told me then no Christina Pokemon girl was only a success only because it has this fabulous IP Pokemon this is never repeatable and what we have seen for quite a long time and quite a long time in this industry Mobile two years it took us two years until the next projects bigger project in this genre came up so I'm really happy that in 2018 we now not only have Pokemon but we have

Jurassic world and Walking Dead and I sneaked filings in our game so these are all and there are games out there which are doing fabulous numbers so it's not that Pokemon goal was the only hit out there which could cash out on the on the players but there are other ones and now I'm really not the pimply little sister anymore hopefully so what I would like to talk about in the first instance and then we're coming to so what I want to talk about is what AR is really about so I looked up the definition again I really like to talk about definitions because they define the way how we're thinking at the moment augmented reality is defined as the technology that super imposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world first providing a composite view in other

words we open the camera onto a texture or we open the camera and show a texture at a specific deal location or we point the camera at a specific object and the phone is telling me that in this case it is a cup boring sorry to say that I don't want a flame I'm super impressed by the games out there but the point is the big problem is with my camera my my phone telling me that the cup in front of me is a cup is not value-adding at all my eyes already process that and that it's not interesting another thing having a texture on a geolocation or a texture just spawning behind my camera in front of my camera picture is not value-adding it doesn't give me any context it's just a texture so okay this I like a bit more

but what if we open our minds a bit and we are saying augmented reality is not a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world but augmented reality is a technology which enables any digital product to be influenced by the real world so saying digital product is influenced by the real world is able to react on real-world happenstances and maybe even the influence doesn't only have to be the computer-generated image so the game is not only reacting in a way it's showing me an image but it could also be on any feature of the app so any feature of your app could react to the real world and maybe even vice versa so that the digital product is

influencing the real world but this is maybe too big so if we think about augmented reality in that way a vision like that is possible if we restrict us to the former definition something like that will never happen so this is actually the vision I'm having when I'm talking about mentality I am was my company more bordering on the location-based augmented reality side than the other but the context of a location assessment I'm talking about now is maybe influencing Bo's so the smartypants of you will maybe think you have seen ah to pull something like that off why not just integrate Google Maps or maybe your weather service again it took other companies to pull something of like Pokemon go over two years and this is not you the fact that it's super easy to

just do a draw call to Google Maps and then have the whole map and all the stuff you need for SATs okay so what we're doing or what we started to build over four years ago is the Koala engine which basically is a one-stop shop for any kind of real world data in the world so we of course have geolocation time and weather that we also factor in what's in your surroundings what are the moon phases transportation aviation data notic local events historic information we know the fact that you're standing in front of an apple tree in the real world and this habit fee you can harvest for free because it's on public ground we know when there is a plane going over your head going to Honolulu and is done by Lufthansa we could even react on you sitting in a train having a five minutes delay whatever is out there in the information we get it on one platform so how it all works is pretty simple so

there is the website so it's open for any third developer so we're not keeping it to ourselves but we're licensing that away so basically what you what you need to do to get the ground bases the ground data for everything you need you can just go to our website subscribe build your project click together all the contexts and all the information you need for your own project include our API in your project and then leave your credit card you pay per monthly active user of your app but that's enough of the sales pitch so things you need to consider when you want to make the whole world your playground you need the whole goal to fill in automatically so all the information be it whether it be a transportation be its you want to know all the supermarket's of the world this needs to be there automatically worldwide another thing which is super important you don't want to cater per hand for different countries so you need a service which

helps you which helps you figure out that there is the potato day in in the US whereas there's a pi day somewhere else and Christmas is for everyone I don't know so this needs to be covered what needs to be covered is that you have areas which are restricted so imagine your game and you super epic loot box is spawning on an active railway and the train is five minutes away so you don't want that to happen or even when you talk about specific countries and one country it might be okay that people are running around a church with a phone in their hand other countries would go crazy because of that so all this you have to factor in examples where we use the technology is we responding in the big champion of the graveyard at night in some countries not in all on a cemetery at night with a full moon and when it's stormy weather for example we have a use case where we

use the information that a person it's all opt-in is in a gambling hall for a specific for a specific amount of time and he gets a distress call he sends the phone is automatically sending in the distress call to his sponsor and we also use it to recognize street signs and combine it with with data traffic data so for example that you can can show statistics on how many accidents happens here and why it is really reasonable that you only are allowed to drive 100 crime ha you would say in German at this point and not write faster so one other thing you have to take into account when playing with the real world when playing with everything you want to have two things you want to have specific vacations where your app is reacting on so like poker stops a specific landmark where you want people to go or a supermarket or front but maybe you don't want to make

them walk maybe you don't want to be geolocation based game or walking it maybe you want to be something else then you need to have the solution to define areas so imagine how cool it would be if you do a Mafia Wars game and you could actually build your big Imperium and it is actually grounded founded on real-world crime data sorry for the picture it's a bit creepy and this is bringing me back to the part how the digital world could maybe influence the real world so the cool thing is what we can also do is we can let you place your digital creations be at a present for another player beard a message or being it the awesome epic firm you just build you can put it somewhere in the real world like here and you can watch it in augmented reality every time you go here and if a friend of you who who's also playing the game could also see it here

so you could put your digital creation and scatter them around the world and this leaves lots of different opportunities why this is why this is all about or important to things augmented reality is coming and it's getting huge we have the opportunity to make every landmark every real odd happenstance a retention feature so the moment it starts raining it could be super valuable for you to enter your app because hey everything on your farm is growing faster now or and another point yeah this is this is cool the moment Pokemon go introduced whether into Pokemon goes so that the pokemons reacted or the spawns reacted on on rain on actual weather they saw a 20 percent increase in retention so these kinds of real-world contexts are a real retention driver and the other thing is you can be really healthy with your player because

you have the option here of making little nuances little things players usually height you can make them nice again because not many people like to wait in the supermarket line but actually because you're in a supermarket something could happen in your app or no one likes rain and it could be awesome so you can redefine special circumstances for players yeah I wanted to make the picture better so last time when I was here and was talking about the topic I didn't bring any kind of video so this time and and everyone flamed me for that so this time I brought one so if we've got enough time then the longer one three minutes this is what we're currently working on hi guys we are creating a game called farmstead farmstead is a mobile free-to-play very social augmented reality farming game and the reason we are creating this game

is that every time a farming game has launched on a new platform whether it was farmville on Facebook or hey day on early smart devices it's been a huge hit and so we are going to create the very first augmented reality farming game you start by creating your farm in the real world and what you can harvest on your farm depends on your actual real world setting so for example you can find mushrooms in forest areas you can find fish in rivers and so on you can expand your own farm to adjacent squares and you can build more structures and plant more crops on those squares once you have your farm you can plant crops and you can gather from all the squares adjacent to where you're standing if you want to gather outside those squares you'll need to send a worker which is the game's very own energy mechanic what you gather on your farm you can sell either to supermarkets or you can choose

to craft and to higher level goods which you can sell to restaurants which is the game's quest system since restaurants require more refined goods they'll pay you more for them but they take longer to create in a more difficult supplying restaurants and stores gives you coins which in turn help you expand your farm even further in forum state it also makes sense to explore the world outside your farm because everywhere you go you can find seeds and young animals which you can then bring back to your farm and plant you do this by playing a game of luck which is influenced by your actual context whether it's weather time your location the moon phases the season or any other factor and by the way your farm itself is also influenced by these contexts so if it starts raining for example your crops will grow faster and the moon is full your workers harvest faster because they can't sleep funds that also has a classic augmented reality component

which is the players can point their camera at a flower and we will identify the flower for them and let them collect these so with each new flower you finally can collect a ton of bees which you can bring back to your farm and use to terraform the land create rare crops and grow rare resources the game will also show you places where you can actually harvest real crops and fruit in real life these are based on publicly available crops and trees in our database so the last part of the game is the social features the first of these is community artists every single real world Park will be a community garden where players will have to work together to clear weeds and plant crops and then every player can come and collect crops from the same garden you'll also be able to visit your friends farms to see what they're building and growing and finally every restaurant will have a leaderboard where players can compete to be the top provider to their favorite restaurants so thank you for watching this brief

intro to the farmstead we hope you enjoyed it and we're very excited to work on this game that's it for me [Applause] [Music]