A long-term couple walks through the mall with hands held, window shopping and dreaming about their future together. She pauses at a jewelry store and starts looking at the rings they have on display to the outside. Her boyfriend tries to pull her away, but before he gets far they both see a flash out of their peripherals and hear something metal drop to the floor. They go over to investigate and are stunned with disbelief as they see a diamond ring glistening on the floor. They bend to pick it up and receive an item for their virtual inventory that they can redeem in the store for a discount on an engagement ring. The store just wanted to engage prospective customers.

At Practical, we’re on a mission to map the world in three dimensions, but it is more than spatial. We need to understand the locations around us, the objects within, and the actions we take. We need to help computers understand every piece of this reality so that we can infuse digital content directly within. Our platform is first and foremost a platform for computer understanding, a sustainable incentive based collection engine that will lead to a complete combination of digital and physical. Computers cannot augment what they do not understand. They cannot adapt if they do not know what they are adapting to. They cannot create if they do not have context in which to create.

An indie game developer has created a new 3D menu for her game and is not sure on what size will look good when users summon it from the ceiling. Her game takes about an hour to build for deployment to a device and creating a separate application to test one piece would take up a considerable amount of time. She wishes there was an easy way to quickly see it, change the sizing, and watch it fly down from her ceiling.

We realized early on that we could not immerse others without having first immersed ourselves so we embarked on a journey not only to build, but to learn. We learned about entrepreneurship, we learned about computing, but most of all, we learned how to shift our digital mind from thinking in two dimensions to three dimensions. While our goal is to map the world (and everything in between) in 3D, our mission is to enable a shared, persistent, and channelized overlay of our physical world. These three concepts have many complex pieces when looked at on their own, and the task of elegantly intertwining them is monumental. Many companies will try, some will fail, and a few will define the tools for us all to collaboratively create a more interactive world. When the entire world becomes a digitally enabled canvas, how will we paint it?

Credit — Marianne Broome

An amateur artist creates his first masterpiece in Photoshop, a piece meant for his grandmother. He longs to visualize his work of art on the wall as if they were on display in an art gallery. He searches far and wide for print shops that can bring his piece out of the screen and no matter the quality of printing, it never looks quite right. He would love to visualize it through his new smart glasses, but he is intimidated by the technical complexities of creating an application and more so the process of explaining to his grandmother how to install it on her device. He would like his creation to simply find a spot and appear, surprising his grandmother when she sits down to watch TV.

A 5-year old boy named Link starts building a virtual castle out of blocks in his living room after school. He builds it as tall as he can, climbing up his stairs to get a better vantage point. His goal is to build the biggest castle he possibly can. As he comes close to finishing, he is filled with excitement as it comes to life in his own home. Link wants to immediately share it with dad who’s away for work. He accesses a tool to capture it, miniaturize it, and chooses a big truck to drive across his father’s hotel room floor to deliver his new creation. Link just wants to build and share.

When dealing with monumental things, you must first break them down into pieces before you can plan to conquer. With posts like these, updates we deliver to our products, and content we create, we will unfold our vision for the next reality.

A startup hero wants to record an inspiring greeting and have a holographic version of himself fly through the building, land on the floor in front of the door and deliver his message to every new person that enters. After greeting them, he wants his superhero holographic self to invite them on a tour to learn about the campus while battling invaders with their newfound superpowers. He doesn’t want to ask people to download his application, he just wants to welcome people.

A young lady sits on her bed full of frustration as she studies and tries to comprehend chapter 11 of her book for an upcoming physics exam. She hears a gust of wind to her right and looks over to see a holographic paper airplane with hearts above it fluttering through her window. It continues to slowly fly towards her leaving a trail of flower petals in tow. It lands on her bed and opens with a message from her fiancé, “You’ll do great tomorrow.” it reads. She slowly swipes it off her bed, smiles, and returns to her studies with a different state of mind. She just wants to be surprised.

The examples are endless and across all sectors of life whether it be playing, working, or learning. None of these examples would be possible without a spatial element. The painting has to know there is a spot available to be attached to the grandmother’s wall. The note has to know where the window is inside of the room to begin the experience. The store has to understand that the prospective couple is looking through the window, they have to be connected to the same map, and the virtual ring has to know that there is a floor to land on. Beyond high quality maps, with the boundless amounts of creativity our minds emit, we need to enable user-generated content to be shared with ease across space and time and without any barriers before consumption. If the recipient of any one of those applications needed to download or open a different application before they could experience, the magic, surprise and awe would be entirely lost. The last required element is identity. Without a way to uniquely identify and connect users, they cannot collaborate and communicate within this new digital world. A universal system must be born, but most of all, this system must allow the user to stay anonymous when desired and spawn new virtual identities at will.

With the recent introduction of the spatial placement tool to KEY SDK, and the upcoming introduction of our placement engine to GATEWAY, we can begin to enable micro-experiences like detailed above. Although some reach further into the future than others, many of those examples will be possible sooner than you think.

— Micheal

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We are on a mission to map the world in 3D and we cannot do this alone.