Hi all,
We’ve got an inquiry with a MAJOR awesome idea and we are currently looking for a platform to build it on. Lightship looks to have the best cards. Therefore I’d like to get in contact with dev(s) with a bit more experience with Lightship already to see if it’s solid enough to actually do it.
The idea is simple; an employee will use his/her smartphone to hide eggs all around the store, basically a treasurehunt. There will be around 750 - 1.000 stores within The Netherlands that will participate. The users will be able to do the game by downloading the app. It will use a streetmap to show the user where the eggs are hidden. The user will walk up to the egg and has to look for it. It will be hidden behind things where we are planning to use the realworld mapping system to have the right occlusion there. We will have several different eggs with different ‘points’. It’s a time based game with bonus or minus points with certain eggs.
We will need a basic backend to see how many retailers have set out a treasure hunt. Also to see how many users, collect some minor data as in Nickname, fullname, emailaddress.
Looking forward to hear your thoughts.
Kind regards,
Jan Verwoerd - 360Fabriek
Welcome Jon! It’s a neat idea 
I’d likely leave this to Niantic to confirm but I think you’d likely want to wait until their real world mapping stuff is released sometime next year. It sounds like that’s got the functionality you’re looking for, but it’s not released yet so not sure what it’s like personally!
Hi Patrick, I really appreciate the reply, thank you for that. I was assuming real world mapping is one of the key feature this platform launched with? At least, Niantic is promoting it all the way… Would be really weird if that is not one of the features. Do you develop with this platform already? Would you be open to have a call with us? Maybe you can be one of the devs doing this with us.
The real world mapping side of things they’ve mentioned is upcoming — but there’s a lot you could achieve with meshing still that could bring a similar concept to life (it would likely just be more randomised in terms of positioning of the eggs but you’d still get the occlusion and such!). Or you could use multiplayer for a bunch of people to be able to hunt for the eggs together
Is the ability that the anticipated real world mapping release will enable is to be able to more accurately locate a virtual object in a 3D indoor space? I had thought it more about outdoor space experiences.
For example is the unaddressed problem this: if the employee maps an egg, say in a corner next to the chilled dairy box, another persons device running the app will currently have a hard time really ensuring that the virtual egg ends up in the same spot (especially after the employee has quit the app)? The egg might be a meter or more off, and even if the app is clever enough to know to put it in a corner, it might be a different detected corner.
My understanding is that the current ARDK provides nascent multiplayer capabilities which allows the employee and the players to have a decent shared experience (egg in the same place) if they are all connected at the same time, and the employee is the “host”. So the real world mapping improvements would allow the same thing to happen somehow even without that real time coordination?
Whenever I heard Real World Mapping in Lightship context before, I presumed it was going to be more about mapping specific static features of the real world outside where there are benefits from both better GPS positioning quality and a somewhat finite set of immobile features near specific lat/longs that Computer Vision AIs can be trained to (e.g. fountains, statues).
That’s cool on its own, but if its more about improving a the ability to solve the shared mesh map indoors, that’s really exciting. I’ve been thinking of building a similar app for indoor object placement but assumed I would have to have each user first scan an easily recognized static anchor point indoors (like a QR code sticker for example) in order to map the detected mesh space to the real world space accurately.
@Dav_Yaginuma jump into our discord! Also, let’s chat. DM me on discord.