At age 25, Anjney Midha has a stronger resume than some people twice his age. Before graduating from Stanford, he joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He led the firm’s investment in Magic Leap, the mysterious and much-hyped augmented reality company. Then he ditched venture capital to pursue a dream that had followed him from a technology-free young adulthood on a bird sanctuary in India, to the hyper-connected streets of Singapore, to his days at Stanford.

That dream was to share his world—more than he could show in a photo, better than what he could convey with words—with the family and friends he’d left in India. In July, he and his college friend Ankit Kumar cofounded a company called Ubiquity6 that tries to do exactly that, through an augmented reality app for phones. “We allow anyone with a phone to create a space together and then start editing that space, editing reality together,” Midha says.

On Wednesday, Ubiquity6 debuted its app, which implements several features that have not previously been brought together. Using the phone’s camera, the app creates a 3D map of a room in about 30 seconds—much faster and more accurately than what is typically possible with a phone, which today can take many hours. It uses deep learning to recognize the walls and furniture for what they are, and comprehends their physics so that a digital ball bouncing off a real-world couch behaves differently than a ball hitting a hardwood floor.

Most AR apps today are solo experiences, but this app lets people invite others into their digitally enhanced environment. In preliminary tests Midha says the app hosted 10,000 users in a single space. Those users can then interact with digital objects or characters that take on a life of their own. For example, one day you and your friends might decide to play with a digital lion cub. If you close the app and return a day later, the cub might come bounding over to greet you (or beg you for food). That’s unusual, too—most AR experiences don’t last beyond a single session.

These features may not sound groundbreaking, but that’s a reflection of the early, experimental state of AR. For it to grow into a useful, mainstream phenomenon, AR will have to tap into humans’ innate desire to connect with one another, and it will have to become much smarter about its environment. Pokemon Go, the breakout AR game of 2016, only offered a rudimentary way for multiple users to inhabit the same digital space. That may change in future games. Niantic, the maker of Pokemon Go, last month acquired a startup called Escher Reality that has been developing multi-person, persistent AR experiences. And last September, Apple showed off a multiplayer AR game called The Machines, in which players shoot each other’s robots as they run around on a flat surface such as a floor or tabletop. Ubiquity’s graphics can’t compete with the exquisite polish of The Machines, but its technology supports a richer mix of real and artificial worlds: One of its games lets you put a digital basketball hoop on any wall and play a pick-up game with friends.

The most distinguishing feature of Ubiquity6, however, is that it’s not a one-off app. Most AR experiences today are standalone games or tools to assist in shopping or real estate, such as the app that lets you see what digital replicas of Ikea furniture would look like in your home. “It’s kind of like if you had to download a separate browser for every single website you wanted to visit,” says Midha. Ubiquity is a platform from which you can launch a suite of games and reality-editing tools. Midha calls it a spatial browser.