Niantic Lightship Templates: Learn with Future House Studios


Our Lenslist x Lightship Templates Challenge may be over, but the creation and learning process is definitely not! 😎 Niantic Lightship platform holds many tools for building the real-world metaverse and immersive AR experiences, including world-mapping, semantic segmentation, and shared AR feature sets. For guidance and making the creative process as easy and smooth as possible, you can use Lightship’s Templates – pre-developed projects meant not only for beginners but also masters of AR. ⚡️

Today we invite you to explore the possibilities of Templates with Future House Studios, an award-winning Metaverse creation company. 👾🌍 Their dream team, consisting of experienced artists and developers, creates movies, games, virtual entertainment, VR & AR experiences and incredible animation. Their mission is to help brands tell their stories in an unforgettable way – and today, you can join them on an adventure as they tell you more about 2 projects created in Lightship. Follow along! 🚀

Duel of Wizards

Created for the Niantic Lightship Winter Challenge and having won the Best in Sharing category, Duel of Wizards is a multiplayer AR game where users can fight their friends as wizards, using spells and their surroundings.

To create a similar project, use these Templates: Meshing, Semantic Segmentation, Multiplayer

… and follow guidelines from Future House Studios:

  • Highly recommended: Start off with the Multiplayer Template. Networking has a lot of small things that tie it together and it’s easy to forget something. Use the Template to make sure that you have everything you need in there.
  • Next, get ”Meshing” working in the scene. It’s very easy to set up and will give you surfaces for your 3d objects to interact with.
  • Lastly, start working on the semantics. In order to get a similar use case in your own experience, you’ll need to jump into the code to limit the sampling to a portion of the screen. Doing that will help you set up triggers that can make different things happen. With that, simply just add in your own code and have fun with it!

    • Defender

    Defender is a classic Arcade-style game brought to AR and tied to the real world using Lightship’s VPS. With enemies spawning right above you, the catch is to defend yourself!

    To create a similar AR experience, use these Templates: VPS, Semantic Masking, Depth Estimation.

    … and follow the steps:

  • Start off with the VPS Template to set up your 3D object in the scene. You can use the #REPLACEME object within the Template to help set up your objects in the real world.
  • From there you just add the semantic masking code into the scene. In Defender, it’s used to help the ships come up from behind the hill and stand out against the sky. It’s a great simple effect that helps ground your objects within the world. From there everything else was handled by the custom game code.

    • Tips & Tricks:

  • Don’t be afraid to start off small! It’s easy to get wrapped up in a big grand idea only to get blocked as you try to understand how everything works. Take it one feature at a time and explore its capabilities. It’s very possible that you’ll be pleasantly surprised and find something interesting that you weren’t expecting.
  • When working with the Templates it’s always good to understand their underlying setup. Within the Template, there are a lot of small things that are working together to produce the effect—knowing how they work really helps when combining Templates together or further augmenting them to bring out new solutions.
  • Always use a Template for the most complex feature in the project. Templates are made to make the difficult parts of Lightship easier to work with. However, in its current state, Lightship only allows one Template to be brought into the scene at a time. Using the Template to tackle the more difficult items will free you up to work on the rest of the experience.

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    Huge thanks go to Future House Studios for letting us and the whole AR Community inside these AR experiences. This sharing the knowledge, tips, tricks, and advice makes the creation process a lot more enjoyable! ⭐️ Keep an eye out for more projects from Future House Studios and follow them on Instagram, LinkedIn, and their website.

    We think everyone can agree that it’s amazing to see Lightship’s features in action. 🚀

    With constant support within the Community and the Templates’ opportunities, your next project in Lightship can be a big step towards creating an interactive AR experience – explored by people all over the world! 🌍😎 Brainstorm, grab the Templates and dive into Lightship!