Fair Worlds + Niantic Spatial: A Space-Time Journey

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

We’re announcing that our latest Space-Time Adventure Tour, an immersive audio tour series, is coming to New York this summer. This innovative experience takes you through a part of New York City's iconic Central Park showcasing its rich history with a comedic narrative, using cutting-edge AR technology powered by Niantic Spatial. 

Our relationship with Niantic Spatial has been years in the making. It all started with our first iteration of Space-Time Adventure Tours which was born out of the pandemic. We wanted to create experiences that could be safe and fun outside, which made us start to think about walking tours.

We started brainstorming potential locations and we selected Seattle because #1, it was near one of our two offices and #2, it was the site of the 1962 World’s Fair. World’s Fairs are near and dear to our hearts because our company name “Fair Worlds” is a play on “World’s Fair.” There is an optimism and whimsy at World’s Fairs that we need now more than ever.

We had a lot of fun creating the Seattle 1962 World’s Fair tour and we learned a lot from its development. We started to build a design philosophy for these tours that marries both the whimsy and fun in the storytelling and gameplay while making sure a wide audience can participate in the tour. We push hard on making sure the tour is accessible and reduce barriers where we can. Andy Slater, our audio designer who is legally blind, advocated and pushed us to consider how we could help players navigate our tour. One of the core features that came out of that was spatial audio navigation, audio cues that inform players where to go next.

As we built out our experience, we were drawn to using Niantic’s Lightship SDK (now Niantic SDK) because our core philosophies were aligned: making fun and safe experiences that get people outside and exploring the world. 

We launched the Seattle World’s Fair tour around the 60th anniversary of the Fair, and we even got the Mayor of Seattle to try it out.

Coming off the success of the first tour in Seattle, we wanted to see if we could pull off another tour and add features from the user testing feedback we got. We ended up selecting New York Central Park.

It was a fun challenge to remotely design the tour with only one person on-site for field testing (that’s what we call doing QA). We created a route that starts at Inventor’s Gate and winds its way to Bethesda Fountain, to the Alice in Wonderland Statue, and ends up right behind the Met Museum at Cleopatra’s Needle. 

We added the Visual Positioning System (VPS) to our tours, which allowed us to place virtual content at centimeter accuracy. For our Seattle Tour, we allowed users to place content anywhere, but with Niantic VPS we could craft the story with the environment. This opened new doors and led to challenges like placing 3D content precisely in the real world. We ended up selecting the Alice in Wonderland statue as our test subject and when you scan the location, a Jabberwock will appear on the Mad Hatter’s hat, which is equal parts delightful and scary.  

We use this Niantic Spatial technology as an invitation to explore the real world. If you’ve gone on other walking tours, you are often passively listening, but not actively engaging with the content. We very intentionally design the tour to fluctuate between active and passive participation. 

We are very excited to launch this New York Central Park tour this summer!

So what’s next for Fair Worlds and Space-Time Adventure Tours? We’ve been brewing on that! Our consensus is that we want to take what we’ve learned in the first two tours and build a “tour building framework” for ourselves and other creators, leveraging Niantic Studio for no-code/low-code development of new stops, and more web-based AR experiences. We also want to expand existing tours to be in a group setting with Shared AR experiences. As we continue along this journey, we are very proud to collaborate and partner with the Niantic Spatial now and in future projects.