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NextNav has integrated its vertical place service into an upcoming mobile game named Atlas: Earth from developer Atlas Reality. With it, game developers will be in a position to pinpoint players in 3 dimensions, like what floor they’re on in a skyscraper.
The Sunnyvale, California-based NextNav considers its Pinnacle vertical place service to be the next generation of the Global Positioning System (GPS), which provides us a two-dimensional place on just about every smartphone. Using constructed-in smartphone barometers and other technologies for 3D geolocation, NextNav has figured out how to capture our areas in 3D.
It’s correct adequate to give the developer a place as precise as what floor a particular person is standing on in a multistory constructing, mentioned Dan Hight, vice president of organization development at NextNav, in an interview with GamesBeat. And that is how Atlas Reality will be in a position to figure out exactly where its players are more precisely with its Atlas: Earth game.
“This will be the first time that vertical location is actually used as part of the gameplay,” Hight mentioned. “We’ve been talking about bringing access to a wider array of different developers. We’re really excited about that and how it will unlock new capabilities.”
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Atlas: Earth
Image Credit: NextNav/Atlas Reality
Atlas: Earth will leverage the 3D information for actual-estate gameplay. If you assume of Monopoly, it is comparable but only that the virtual buildings are overlaid on the actual world. So players can purchase the prime floor of a luxury condo or anything like that. In games like Atlas: Earth, players will be in a position to invest actual income to purchase virtual home, and NextNav will confirm the place of that virtual home.
Atlas: Earth will provide a gaming knowledge constructed about the actual environments of customers, specifically in densely populated locations and multistory buildings, marking the initially time the vertical dimension will energy gaming functionality.
Atlas: Earth launches October 18, and it is now out there for “preregistration.” It will permit customers to buy virtual parcels of actual estate that, when owned, operate as digital properties tethered to actual areas. Within the game, Pinnacle will provide precise vertical place intelligence, enabling customers to record visits to areas such as the prime floor of the Empire State Building or the Skygarden in the San Francisco Federal Building. Players could even rent space in somebody’s virtual constructing.
It introduces a model in which customers can earn actual earnings by promoting virtual things that can only be bought when a user is physically on-premise — which is verified by NextNav’s Pinnacle — at areas owned inside the game’s universe.
Atlas Reality previously launched Atlas: Empires, a 2D place game that was like other people of its ilk such as Niantic’s Pokémon Go. Atlas: Empires got more than 500,000 downloads, mentioned CEO Sami Khan in an interview with GamesBeat. Atlas Reality was in a position to effortlessly integrate tech in component mainly because NextNav last year released its Pinnacle application development kit (SDK) for the Unity engine.
Marketing the actual world
Khan is a seasoned marketer who worked at the fintech startup Acorns, which lets individuals save income in their savings accounts with just about every buy. He enjoyed gamifying fintech, and he saw a comparable chance with finance-oriented games, such as the virtual actual estate game genre, which has been about as extended as corporations have been building virtual versions of Monopoly. But in this case, Khan’s Atlas: Earth game is tied to actual-world areas, and that is what Atlas Reality is going right after.
“We’re thinking about games in a different way, bringing technology to gaming to create some mechanics the game industry has ignored,” Khan mentioned in an interview with GamesBeat. “Four years ago [under the Cerberus Interactive name], we started building a real-world metaverse that we knew was going to be a bed for a lot of our first-party games. We were inspired by Sim City” and other simulation games.
Image Credit: NextNav
In contrast to Niantic, Atlas Reality decided to make games that are unique mainly because they are not exclusively played outdoors. They can have a foraging or scavenging aspect, and they’re tied into forms of technique games.
“We’ve built this platform internally in-house that allows us to build these map-based games extremely quickly, so we can design new game maps in a matter of a week instead of weeks or months,” Khan mentioned.
“Atlas: Empires proved we can build a location-based game with the design pillars we had in mind,” Khan mentioned. “With Atlas: Earth, we have segmented the entire planet into 30 feet-by-30 feet squares that you can buy as parcels.”
And if a player buys the most parcels in the city of Austin, Texas, then that particular person becomes the mayor of the virtual city.
“We have a world full of virtual objects you can buy, and we’ll have landmarks that you can purchase as well,” Khan mentioned.
And Khan hopes the economy will not consist of just static objects. For instance, you could dress up your virtual home and make it look much better utilizing lumber from a virtual lumber mill. Players should really be in a position to sell their home to other people for a profit and then reinvest that in other home in the game.
Integrated with Unity
Image Credit: NextNav
Since Unity powers most mobile games, that SDK enabled millions of developers to integrate vertical place capabilities into any application constructed with the Unity engine, which includes geolocation games, instruction applications, industrial and manufacturing apps, and beyond.
“Unity made it fairly seamless with a lot of technical work that they did on their side,” Hight mentioned. “They saw this as a unique opportunity.”
More lately, the plug-in became a Unity Verified Solution, which guarantees it is optimized for integration with the newest version of the Unity editor, and gives a seamless knowledge for Unity developers. Developers who use the NextNav Pinnacle SDK can integrate it into any application constructed with the Unity engine.
“Just like with any new technology, you have your innovators and early adopters, and I think we’re focused right now on kind of this innovator class that sees this,” Hight mentioned. ” We hope that other developers will begin pulling this technologies into their games, and good results will breed good results.”
A new SPAC
In June, NextNav agreed to go public by means of a merger agreement with Spartacus Acquisition Corporation, which is a particular goal acquisition organization (SPAC). In that $1.2 billion deal, NextNav will take a shortcut to going public via a merger transaction with publicly traded Spartacus Acquisition, which was made by investors to take a organization public. The transaction is anticipated to close late in the third quarter of 2021 or early in the fourth quarter of 2021, topic to satisfaction of customary closing circumstances.
Part of the explanation that NextNav believes it has a sturdy adequate organization to go public is that numerous 911 emergency services will call for vertical positioning information so that initially responders can figure out what floor to go to when an individual tends to make an emergency get in touch with from a significant constructing.
