Words by Dave Tate

First off I want to say thank you for giving me early access to the builder! I’ve always had an idea of what I would want to build if something like this ever came along. I’m a long time supporter of the LA Zoo, I’ve held an annual pass for over 16 years and I volunteer & donate whenever I can.

The LA Zoo has played around with augmented reality past and actually released an app called “Dinosaurs Unextinct,” which turns the dinosaur statues found throughout the park into interactive exhibits. The experience is extremely limiting and really miss the mark on how I would envision AR being used at a Zoo.

I’m not a computer programmer by any means so I never really looked into augmented reality until I discovered Metaverse. Using the builder, I was about to create an educational tour throughout the zoo, with interactive experiences hovering over each exhibit.

To get started, I visited the zoo and recorded the coordinates of each of the exhibits using Apple Maps. I then used these coordinates to place AR experiences inside each of the exhibits.

I wanted my tour to be enjoyed by children so I personified the animals and created a fictional zookeeper named Steve. The animals themselves welcome the user to the exhibit and Steve then provides information about the species, and in some cases quizzes the user.

Creating a multiple choice scene in Metaverse was a piece of cake! I added user responses; linked the incorrect responses to an incorrect slide and the correct response transition to a congratulatory slide. The user would be given the correct answer whether they were right or wrong.

After speaking with some of the people at metaverse, I was able to reference the username of a user by entering %user% in the speech bubble above the character.

Next time you’re at the zoo be sure to check out my interactive tour, I have over 58 experiences so far. Thanks Metaverse, I had a lot of fun doing this!

If you would like to create your own experiences, sign up for a beta of our mobile builder. Let us know what you created: create@gometa.io