For example, Ori is looking for a casual augmented reality game and enumerates the reasons. We like his thinking! It felt like he was reading our minds, not to mention our business plan!
There's also the question of how valuable Augmented Reality technology really is if mobile AR browsing is kind of like eating marmite (via Augmented Planet) -- you either love the experience, or you hate it.
We wanted to build an Augmented Reality, Geo-Located experience. We also wanted to build a successful, long-term business. We ended up believing that AR provides massive opportunity for social gaming, both in terms of business, and creativity, and fun for our users.
These are some of the issues about Augmented Reality an related topics we addressed while building our app.
1. Is AR for Browsing or Creating? (Information vs. Imagination)
We wanted our users to create and interact with alternative worlds. That's where we started. The notion of escape to a different world is a basic human desire, and we're fascinated by AR's ability to provide an infinite number of "realities" overlaid on the real world.
AR browsers (mostly passive viewing of non-editable environments) work fairly well now, and will work better in the future. Our opinion on the marmite question: they're great - better than a maps - if you're within a block of what you're looking for, and worse than a map otherwise. Can marmite have a context? Possibly.
But pretty quickly, we figured our design goals were not to have our users be passive consumers. We want to let people create pet dragons, secret gardens, deserts in the city, and lakes in the desert. We want our audiences to engage with the new worlds, return to them frequently, and have a blast when they do.
And it's clear that editable virtual environments can be very, very good business if they are compelling. FarmVille, is a virtual environment where about 1% of the human race plays on a monthly basis. If a 2.5D sheep can be compelling, how about a virtual farm that lives outside your real house? If millions of people will spend money to feed fish in a 2.5D aquarium, how much more will they spend on 3D fish that follow them everywhere?
We think AR works well, right now, as a casual and creative medium. So that's how we intend to use it.
2. What Belongs in Augmented Reality Worlds? (The "Yo Media" Problem)
Our emphasis on creativity led quickly to User Generated Content (UGC). Wouldn't it be cool to put a photo of your loved one on the corner where you met? Leave a poem for your new best friend outside his/her house? Annotate a menu outside a restaurant?
Yes it would. But experience suggests most people won't do that. Open UGC systems are full of random personal stuff which has meaning only to the person who created it ("Yo Wassup!"+a picture - hence, the "Yo Media" problem). This works great if you have massive volume (hello, Twitter, YouTube maybe FourSquare). But with less than massive volume there's no reason for most people to come back - the content only has meaning for the person who made it. Meanwhile, as an AR entrepreneur, you have to give your browser away for free and hope to make it up by monetizing your data volume later. But you don't have enough mass. End of story.
Various companies (including Sekai Camera, TagWhat) have taken this route, or something like it. If they manage to become YouTube for AR, we will salute their success. For us though, we wanted a model which gave our content meaning and established a connection with our users. If the content has meaning, we reasoned, users will come back, which is the essence of a great experience and the basis of many viable business models.
3. Why People Care So Much About 2D Sheep Game Rules = Connection and Meaning)
Why DO people play FarmVille? Well, a few things stand out:
• It's emotional because they've built something (a farm) that's theirs. They can make it better, more cuddly or cute, or just plain nicer. They have an emotional connection to it.
• It needs constant attention. Weeds need pulling, cows need milking, sheep need shearing.
• It doesn't take a lot of effort. Five minutes to tweak your farm, and -- Boom! -- you're done. (But if you want, you can also spend a day there).
In reality, of course, the folks that play FarmVille are carefully manipulated by the super-serious analytics team at Zynga. Nothing wrong with that - it's an exchange - a pleasant experience in return for money - lots of it, in small chunks. But what matters most is that the structure of FarmVille provides the content with meaning -- with a compelling connection to the users -- who are also creators of virtual environments.
4. Social Gaming, the "iPhone Itch," and the Problem of Empty Locations
You know it: its 40 seconds of dead time, and you pull out your iPhone. You check mail, check messages, view news or sports scores, and play a game. From an AR point of view, this is an opportunity and a challenge. If you open your AR Social Game, look around and find something to play with, that'll be fun -- way more compelling than another minute of Tetris! "Hey! There's my pet, I'll feed it."
But many geo-located games (treasure hunts, games modeled on geocaching) require you to hunt things down: Go find the pot of gold. But if the pot of gold is further than 20 feet away, you're not going to go find it. You only have two minutes. You need to play where you are.
The alternate approach is to ensure that location has no effect on the AR game. There are some very nice games that do this (we like Easter Egg Hunt), but we think the interaction of content and location is critical to the sense of "magic" in alternate environments. And, importantly, we think alternate environments want to be shared. Being able to invite your friends, or meet new friends, in an alternate world is a compelling thing. (Second Life has proved this in spades). And, again, it's also good business -- viral, with deeper connection.
This became a key design criterion for TagDis: To enable users to do something immediate, and creative, in the AR world; to scratch the "iPhone itch" immediately. We set out to ensure that what they create in those moments will be shareable and social.
5. Putting Lipstick on a Chicken (The Current State of Mobile AR Hardware)
Yes, AR technology has issues. GPS is patchy. The compass is often inaccurate. Virtual objects jump and move around. There's not much we can do about that right now, so we need to make that a feature of Augmented Reality, rather than a bug. Our job is to put lipstick on that chicken to make it look good!
So we designed our game so it could be played in territories large enough to remain accessible and findable, despite the occasional flakiness of the compass and GPS on the iPhone. And so that exact location didn't matter, but "close enough" did.
6. What's the Elevator Pitch for a Mass Audience?
We looked at a bunch of AR game ideas. We loved most of them. But we noticed that when we described them to people, eyes would glaze over fast. "See, you have a pet which is virtual, and you can see it and pick it up, but it's not there because it's in your phone! Get it? Get it?" Conversations like that.
We understand AR. If you're reading this, you probably understand AR. But when you're pitching a game to a mass audience, you don't have time to explain what AR is. Glazed eyes = gone consumers.
But! We noticed that when we said "you can put virtual graffiti in the real world," most people said "Huh. Wow. Cool. Let me see." The description simply extends an experience that already exists. Real taggers already anotate locations and compete for territory, so the game can be explained easily without having to get geeky about AR.
7. Which Brings Us to TagDis, The Virtual Graffiti Game You Play in the Real World
So that's how we ended up creating our first Socially Augmented Reality Game. We combined all the elements to build a game experience in which:
• Editable, creative environment: players create tags in the app and drop them in the real world.
• Location matters: when you drop a tag, you "own" that area (you are "King") until you are deposed. The more areas you win, the better you do in the game.
• Things change: tags "decay" over time. You have to pay attention to your tag -- vote it up, get your friends to vote it up -- or else it fades away. Or even worse, somebody might spray over it.
• You play where you are: if you are standing in a spot, you can drop a tag and compete. If you are standing in virgin territory, you can drop a tag and become "King" of a spot right away.
• Yo Media: the content is encouraged to be "graffiti style" by the use of a built-in Tag Creator. And success in the game depends on other players liking your content.
• Use of GPS and compass: "Spots" are about a block in size so the game can be played fine independent of the inaccuracies of sensors
• Competition: Players drop graffiti tags compete to be "King" of a local territory.
• It's social: The game has leaderboards both for all players and your in-game friends. Invite your friends, get them to help you win a territory, or try and climb above them in the leaderboards.
• It's ready for monetization. A very basic virtual currency system is built-in.
Lastly. We'll Iterate
The first version is a hint, mostly, of things to come. We have plans for much more elaborate reward systems, better painting tools, better support for competition, better visibility into usage. Lots of stuff.
The strategy: try stuff. See what works. Fix the stuff that doesn't. Do it again.
That's the logic we used when designing TagDis. We hope it's useful to you thinking about the future of AR, gaming and adventure that is ahead! Let us know what you think. See you at ARE2010.
