niantic lightship world tour
This past weekend I went to the Niantic Lightship World Tour event in Los Angeles, California. For those of you not familiar with the name, Niantic is the creator of Pokemon Go, the augmented reality (AR) mobile game. Niantic is trying to build the real life Metaverse that connects augmented reality experiences into the real world. This event I went to was to showcase their new Visual Positioning System (VPS) for Lightship Augmented Reality Development Kit (ARDK). Lightship VPS enables AR experiences to be placed in the real world based on the user’s exact location and orientation. Niantic has stated that Lightship VPS provides the ability for developers to place and persist AR experiences in specific locations in the real world within centimeter-level accuracy. Below you can see a video of an AR experience created with Lightship VPS for DEADMAU5, a famous Canadian music producer.
DEADMAU5 AR Experience — DEADMAU5 riding the Lightship and casting a chain to a real life anchor
In the video you will see that DEADMAU5 is riding a Lightship and casting a chain to a real life anchor. Lightship VPS localizes the user in relation to a real life object, called a Wayspot. In this case, the anchor is the Wayspot. The true beauty of Lightship VPS is how accurate the animation is rendered to a contextual point: the top of the anchor where the chain connects. With typical GPS based AR placement, you cannot place AR experiences within this level of accuracy. By adding visual cues, such as the anchor, to the positioning system, one can place AR animations much more accurately. This is a very important step to creating realistic experiences that help merge AR into the real world.
THE Event
The event took place from November 4th - 6th at Emerson College. It composed of several different sessions on their Lightship offerings in Unity and 8th Wall. The main component of the event, however, was the hackathon competition.
The hackathon competition revolved around building an AR experience that used one of five Wayspots that they created for the competition. We formed our groups of 2-4, based on our interests and separated for the night.
The next day after sessions, my group started hacking. We chose to build an AR experience around a piano that was donated to Emerson by Marvin Hamlisch, winner of multiple Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards. One of my teammates, Andrew, created an amazing 3D piano top with animation that turned the piano lid into stairs that descended into a portal to another world. We integrated this animation into our experience by positioning it on top of the real life piano. We added interactions such as tapping the keyboard, which started the animation, and the playing of the song, One — A Chorus Line, written by Marvin. In addition, we added some musical notes that flew out of the portal into the sky while the song played.
We were all very amazed that we were able to create an experience like this in such a short period of time, given our minimal experience with 8th Wall. The great advantage of using 8th Wall over Unity is the speed of iterations. Any changes you make to your experience is instantaneously deployed on the web. You can see a video of the experience we built in the below video.
Piano Portal — an AR experience in honor of Marvin Hamlisch built during Lightship LA Hackathon
The next morning, we presented our experience. I was really amazed at what everyone else had built. There were some great projects. To our surprise, we had won the 8th Wall part of the competition.
We are looking into adding this as a permanent experience at the college after brushing it up a little and working with Emerson. Overall, the Lightship World Tour 2022 in LA was a great event full of new learnings and lot of great people. I made so many connections and look forward to building the future of augmented reality with them. I look forward to future events held by Niantic.
Piano Portal — Credits
Andrew Towl
Ian Mackenzie
Pedro Acosta
Tom Shannon
