In February, the Niantic and 8th Wall team headed to Miami Hack Week (MHW) 2023 and sponsored the first AR+Web3 house, and the response was incredible. The week was a chance to build relationships with developers, identify new Web3 and WebAR use cases, and get developers confidently building with 8th Wall.
Last month, we challenged you to create your own personalized Character Camera Project to help the holiday season stand out (check out the template here). Submissions were published to your Public Profile to enter (see the contest rules here) and then shared in our Developer Slack community. You can find all of the entries in the #made-with-8thwall channel by searching for the #HolidayChallenge2022 hashtag
With that, let’s share our winners! These are shared in no particular order.
To begin, checkout "Gingy's Gift Grab" by the InVision Communications team. This fun and festive AR game challenged players to collect as many presents as possible before time ran out by controlling an AR gingerbread character named Gingy. The game's charming aesthetic and smooth gameplay earned it a spot among the top five winners!
Augmenting the world is the most common way developers, agencies and brands are using 8th Wall today. Up until now, world WebAR has been primarily focused on the ground. Today, we are over-the-moon excited to introduce Sky Effects, a new feature from Niantic integrated into the 8th Wall platform that allows developers to augment the sky with WebAR.
The 8th Wall team has been on a mission to supercharge your development by providing you with a complete set of tools to create WebAR content. Our cloud-based integrated development environment, the Cloud Editor, was built from the ground up for reality content development and it is now the predominant way our developers create 3D, AR and VR web applications. We designed the Cloud Editor to give developers superpowers and today we are unlocking a new power by making our biggest update since its launch with the introduction of 8th Wall Modules.
Today we are introducing Lightship VPS for Web, bringing the Niantic Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS) to the 8th Wall platform. This first-of-its-kind browser-based technology connects the real world with the digital one by anchoring WebAR content to locations with unprecedented accuracy and precision. This enables location-based augmented reality experiences that feel more personal, more meaningful, and more real, and gives users new reasons to explore the world around them.
Online shopping is quickly becoming the predominant way consumers buy products today. According to eMarketer, e-commerce will make up 21% of worldwide total retail sales this year to a total of $6.169 trillion, up from $3.351 trillion (or 13.8%) in 2019. While e-commerce offers a convenient way to discover and purchase products, the intangible nature of this digital experience presents new challenges to retailers such as an increase in returns. In the United States, nearly 21% of online orders were returned in 2021, totaling $218 billion, according to the National Retail Federation.
Scale plays a critical role in how we experience the world around us. It is even more essential in augmented reality where digital content is placed in our physical space. When AR content uses a scale not typically expected in the real world, such as a tiny rapper performing on a life-size burger, it can result in a magical and extraordinary experience. When the scale of the AR content suits the environment it is placed in, such as a virtual fridge in your actual kitchen, it increases the immersion and utility of the experience. Today, we are excited to announce that our 8th Wall Engine is getting a major upgrade enabling developers with tools to create both these types of AR experiences for the web.
8th Wall has been the home of WebAR-enabled holograms since 2019 and we are pleased to announce our latest integration with our new volumetric video partner, 4Dviews. Starting today, developers can easily add high-quality holograms recorded with 4Dviews’ volumetric capture system, the HOLOSYS, to WebAR projects to engage users on smartphones, computers and AR/VR headsets using 8th Wall’s Metaversal Deployment.