When Pokémon Go incited mass augmented-reality hysteria this summer, one big question that emerged was whether the game’s success would usher in an era of AR applications, or whether enthusiasm for the genre would fizzle. Ex-Googler Dmitry Shapiro is betting that we’ve only seen the beginning of experiences that overlay the digital on the physical world. He's debuting an app that allows anyone to create Pokémon Go-style games within it, and he’s raised $2 million from the likes of former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and venture capital company Greylock Partners to push it forward.



The platform, called Metaverse, can host an unlimited number of AR applications. Anyone can make games or other experiences inside it by using a builder to create Pokémon-style “experiences” and dropping them onto a map that hews to the real world. You can quickly build these worlds, and you don’t have to know how to code, though the creation of more elaborate uses will demand more effort.

Just like with Pokémon Go, you walk up to experiences inside the Metaverse and tap them to interact with them. But unlike Pokémon Go, the Metaverse won’t be limited to one “world.” Its founder, Shapiro, wants it to be a home for multitudes of user-generated scavenger hunts, interactive stories, and even AR worlds directing you to things like public bathrooms. Users can sort through and hop in and out of these worlds at will.

“YouTube made it trivially simple for people to publish video,” Shapiro told BuzzFeed News in an interview. “You could think of this as being a YouTube for interactive experiences.”

The point: Make it easy for anyone to build these experiences, freeing them from the effort needed to develop AR technology, and hopefully they’ll create stuff people want to explore.