Lenslist x Lightship Templates Challenge: Tips & Tricks from Trigger

We have another addition to our Niantic content for you – who’s excited? 🖐 For today’s Inspiration Article we invited Trigger – a mixed reality agency, believing in the power of technology to tell stories and bring immersive worlds, characters, and brands to life in the metaverse. Their team is a distinct group of developers, strategists, visual artists, gamers, musicians, foodies and bookworms who share a love for mixed reality. With various awards and a lot of experience, today they share with us a deeper dive into PGA Jr. Safari Par-Tee App – a unique, interactive AR experience utilizing Niantic’s Lightship SDK. 🦁🌴

It’s time to shower you with Lightship tips and tricks! What Templates to use, how they should be applied – Trigger will help you get rid of any doubts and smooth out your AR experience for our Templates Challenge. 🚀
Let the Lightship masters guide you through their project ! ⚡️

PGA Jr. Safari Par-Tee App

Designed as an interactive mobile game, the PGA Jr. League Safari Par-Tee App allows kids and families to collaboratively play golf as animal avatars while transforming their own setting into the imaginative Adventure Park Golf Course. Developed by Trigger, the app uses Niantic’s powerful Lightship SDK to allow players to scan their surroundings with a smartphone, and create an immersive 3D playspace bringing interactive and whimsical golf courses to their real-world environment. The app utilizes AR multiplayer networking and AR Plane detection.

How to create a similar project? Use Shared Object Interaction and follow the suggestions:

  • Highly recommended: If you are working with Shared AR – work with the Template right off the bat. Networking can be difficult to code but the Template supplies amazing examples and a great high level wrapper to their peer to peer based networking solution.
  • The Template offers an extremely easy way for peers to join each other’s Shared AR experience with the Marker Sync technology. Nothing is really needed but to scan a QR code.
  • The Templates high level wrapper offers a wide variety of tools to keep track of player ownership, player positions, and play states by simply adding 1 component onto a Game Object. This saves a ton of time writing networking code that tries to manage all of this.

    • Tips, tricks and overall advice:

  • Take advantage of the great example scenes the Template provides. The HLAPI Pong example in particular gives supportive first steps into using the High Level API. This will massively help with technical debt and keep the custom network handling to a minimum.
  • Read through the ARDK Template documentation. There can be some nuisances to the technology but if you are willing to take the 30 min – hour plunge into the documentation, it’ll help you significantly in the long run to understand some of the limitations of the technology but also the great features it has to offer.
  • Know what Virtual Studio Mock is! This tool allows you for in editor networking messages that saves a ton on build time and also real world testing time.

    • Working with the Shared AR lightship template was a smooth development process. From examples to documentation, I was able to solve any problem I faced when working to create my application. – Blake Lawton, Software Engineer

    The Lightships ARDK is a great tool and learning experience for all enthusiasts looking to build their very own AR application. There is an abundance of knowledge to be gained for all skill levels. – Brandon Wade, Software Engineer

     

    Huge thanks go to Trigger for sharing their amazing knowledge, tips, tricks and advice – we hope they’ll help you create amazing AR experiences and your Lightship journey grows (so we can be the witnesses)! ⭐️ And of course – stay tuned for more projects from Trigger and follow them on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

    There is still time to make use of our Lightship guides or inspirations from the Community – and work with all this knowledge to create a winning AR experience for our Challenge! 💫
    If you want to take a huge step in the right, creative direction – take your first step in Lightship! 🚀