© UBIQUITY6
Ubiquity6 is making augmented reality social and permanent.
f you look in a corner on the 20th floor of an office tower in the middle of downtown San Francisco, you might find a digital cat and mouse waiting for you.
I put them just inside the offices of an augmented-reality startup, Ubiquity6, with the aid of its smartphone app, Ubiquity. The app—still in the very early stages of development but expected to be released for Android and iOS this summer—lets you add virtual objects to the real world that other people can see and play around with via their own smartphone’s display. If you leave these objects in a physical place, as I did with this white cat and gray mouse (as well as a message floating above a couch that says, in big purple letters, “Rachel was here”), they will persist even after you’re gone, and you can come back to visit and interact with them later.
Essentially, explains Ubiquity6 cofounder and CEO Anjney Midha, the app lets you place virtual objects in physical spaces for your friends to find, and interact with, later.
Want to toss virtual basketballs through a virtual hoop? Or scatter digital hunks of cake that will be gobbled up by hungry lions? Leave a photo of yourself on a wall for someone else to find? With this app, you can do it, then put your phone away and know that the hoop and the cats and the photo will still be there when you pull it back out. It’s weird, cool, and quite possibly the very near future of augmented reality.
The idea of mixing the digital and the actual has been around for a long time, and AR has become almost mainstream on smartphones in recent years thanks to apps like Pokémon Go. Now, Apple and Google actively push developers to build AR apps. Since headsets like Microsoft’s HoloLens and Magic Leap’s yet-to-be-released Magic Leap One remain geared toward developers for now, chances are the smartphone will remain the way most of us experience this kind of reality-mixing for a while.
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Source: MIT Technology Review