Imagine Augmented Reality where you and your friends play around the globe! At ARnDAI we’ve created such a technology — dreams can come true. It’s called Remote AR multiplayer.

Our technology allows you to build any type of remote multi-user interaction in Augmented Reality. You can choose to make an asynchronous or synchronous room-based app in any genre.

My co-founder Ilya Tikhonov and I have been working in Augmented Reality for about four years now, where we’ve seen many of the technology’s problems first-hand. The main one for us is that AR is mostly offline. People want to interact with each other in AR, but they can’t. We were motivated to solve this a long time ago, when we were developing an AR game. We thought it would be great to connect our users so they can play together in AR, but we couldn’t find any solution to do this — excluding collaborative AR, where players must be in the same physical location. Anyway, it seemed to be obvious that AR, like other techs, should have such a feature. However, time has passed, and that tech still hasn’t appeared.

We’ve talked with multiple developers and companies across different industries, including gaming, and most of them told us they were looking for solutions to the same problem — it’s a limitation that has come up again and again.

So we decided not to just to build a game with remote AR multiplayer, but to create tech that would help other developers build such experiences.

It was hard work to build remote multiplayer specifically for AR because we deal with the real world where everything is changing. Light, shadows, objects, and even your device’s position will vary over the course of a play session.

I can name three of the most complicated tests:

1. Analysing user environments. Your phone provides a lot of information about its actual environment using augmented reality frameworks. The challenge was deciding which parameters are sufficient for describing your space, as we can’t always get every detail that we’d like. Then, we needed to figure out how to analyse those parameters in order to build a description model from it.

2. Syncing the coordinates of users with different environments. We need to merge the virtual scenes of all users into a session so their space will be the same and still connected with each user’s physical environment. We didn’t want to just put predefined surfaces as this approach doesn’t make sense in Augmented Reality. With our tech, all the virtual scenes will be as similar as possible while still incorporating elements of each user’s environment.

3. Matchmaking based on the similarity of environments. We want your users to be matched according to the actual space in front of them so that their experiences are similar, even if they’re in different parts of the world. There ought not be any situations where people with completely different environments (e.g a football field versus a small room) are forced into the same AR session, as it just wouldn’t work.

You can apply the tech wherever you want. It’s totally compatible with any type of room-based game or app. Whether you are developing a turn-based strategy game, a fast-paced shooter, or even a collaborative work tool — it can be done easily with ARnDAI tech. What’s more, all of these apps can be cross-platform, so your users can interact through Android and iOS devices simultaneously. That allows you to access over 1 billion AR-compatible devices. Be creative!

I’ll start with an important question: yes, it’s totally compatible and works with ARKit, ARCore, and AR Foundation!

That means if you have an existing app or you’re in the middle of developing one, you can start using our tech immediately. You don’t need to change or re-build anything.

So the tech consists of two major parts:

1. Unity plugin. This part handles the augmented reality experience itself including the extraction of features from user environments, analysis and networking. A bonus feature is that we understand that your users might want to edit their resulting virtual spaces, so we’ve built two options for this. Spaces can be changed in real-time by getting additional information from augmented reality frameworks or users can edit them manually.

2. Server cluster. This is where matchmaking, synchronization, and scene generation are carried. Don’t worry about high load — the game servers scale automatically. Plus, you can host them on any provider.

If you are thinking about building an AR app in your company but you don’t have augmented reality developers — that is not a problem. Our technology handles most of the work related to AR, and multiplayer networking features are also built-in.

Thanks for reading! Lots of updates and features are coming. Get in touch to learn more about the tech and pricing. I’ll be happy to answer any of your questions!

Our website: https://arnd.ai

Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vodolazovvladislav

Remote Augmented Reality Multiplayer was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.