Persistent Beach Ball

Have you and your friends ever played with a beach ball, hitting it up in the air and trying to not let it touch the ground?

Imagine playing this in augmented reality. A digital beach ball appears in the same physical space to everyone around it. People can hit the beach ball back and forth, synchronously.

What if the beach ball could also be interacted with asynchronously? Even if nobody is around, wherever a beach ball was last hit can stay anchored at that specific point in a parcel. Whoever comes across the point in the future can see exactly where the beach ball was left and can now play with it.

This could be a simple proof of concept to learn how to have shared experiences on the Geo Web.

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This one will be really fun and a natural fit for an introductory AR experience. Persistence creates a totally different feeling and experience than a siloed app doing a similar thing too.

Enhancement idea: What if the beach ball kept track of and displayed a leaderboard for the longest streaks to keep people coming back and competing?

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This sparked something in my brain.

I’ve seen plenty of media that shows chess tables in city parks, but never actually seen such an installation in practice. With the Geo Web, one could anchor a digital chess board and pieces to any flat space in a city park.

Since they’re digital, chess pieces could be human sized or even larger. I’m currently imagining the Chess scene from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but instead of magic it uses digital pieces visible through augmented reality.

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Yes! I like that one too! Even if people don’t want to play a full game of chess, people are bound to interact with it. I think a generalizable theme is allowing people to “leave their mark” in a public space in an iterative way.

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