Maplio
Interactive multi-user live AR maps
The augmented reality location engine and social network designed for mobile, with integrated scene editor
Join Maplio at the ground level of mobile innovation!
We are seeking your support. Maplio has been in active development for over 4 years. Maplio's core location engine provides endless possibilities for mobile engagement and we are seeking stage 1 seed funding to establish working partnerships wit content providers and creative groups, scale the project, and add more exciting features!
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Create a session or open the scene editor
Create multi-stage scenes and narratives and share them with the world!
Applications
Maplio is a multi-user GPS and messaging service supporting a wide range of activities across retail, leisure and business sectors
- Self guided tours
- Interactive games - board games, arcade games, RPG, and more!
- Augmented reality adversiting, and information beacons
- Non-digital busines promotions and event augmentation
- City and nationwide freight and vehicle management
- Large scale event management and coordination - festivals, concerts etc
Current Features
Maplio is a fully customisable multi-user interactive map application with integrated scene editor and AR view
Maplio consists of a map view, an AR view and a scene editor to allow anyone to create interactive content
General features
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- Easy QR coode and social network scene and session sharing
- Highly Accurate 360 °user direction tracking and sharing
- Realtime action and object sharing with directional capablities
- Visit, collect, drop and swap digital items
- Engage in whatsapp style chat with other users
- Broadcast messages, alarms and warnings to other users
- Create NCP variants with different behaviours
Scene Editor
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- Create visitable multimedia interactive static locations (anchor)
- Create and share interactive 2D/3D scenes with other users
- Create highly customisable anchor points at real locations maps
- Define narratives, stories and content for immersive user experiences
- Add behaviours and conditions to anchor points to enable configurable narratives
- Group anchor point collections into routes and boundaries
Augmented Reality
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- AR view activates on phone tilt
- Provides accurate GPS located 2D to 3D mapping in realtime
- Supports collectible items, NPSs and unlockable map beacons
Game mode
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- Create user defined NCPs for location gamification
- Define games with team parameters, objectives and timescales
- Create QR Code shareable events so others can join in!
Works in progress
- Create event wrappers and publish an event hub to facilitate creation and participation of events
- Create games and join teams to compete against and collaborate with friends
- Publish high level game template to enable users to create GPS enabled activities
- Publish low level APIs to enable developers to create templates
- Create "playzones" to constrain activiities within geopgraphical boundaries (e.g. parks)
Proofs of Concept
These are not yet implemented but I am actively researching the best way to integrate these items
- Integrate directional data into AR view
- Integrate simple rotating 3D objects into AR view
- P2P webrtc video chat
- Interactive geo-board game
Future roadmap
This is a small representation of the work required to fully realise Maplio as a sustainable and profitable business
See the complete roadmap for more details
- Convert to a mobile app and distribute on multiplatform web stores
- Performance analysis, enhancement and generate scaleability roadmap
- Role based multi-factor authentication and authorisation
- Add paywalls for extended features and authoring capabilities
- Sell advertising space and provide various levels of ad-free engagement for a subscription charge
- 3D object rendering and realtime interactions
- 3D tiltable maps with interactive 3D landscapes
- Scaling maps to support thousands of concurrent users
Technical details
Maplio has been created using industry leading platforms, frameworks and web standards
- Maplio uses Next JS 14 app router, Leaflet and Nest JS socket gateways
- Complex state management and async effects are managed with Redux toolkit
- Presentation and styling are managed with Next Sass
- Realtime communications implemented with websockets and socket.io
- Industry standard user and access management with Auth JS
- All Syntapse web servers run in secure Docker containers reverse proxied by NGINX
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Brief introduction to Maplio
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Maplio: The realtime location engine and social network.
Maplio is a proof of concept platform enabling a wide variety of multi-user realtime location based activities for leisure, retail and business.
If "pacman in the park" and "IRL zombie survival" sound like potentially fun activities for your mobile platform please have a quick read through the investment deck..._
Motivation
- Maplio is intended to be a real-time location based social network allowing users and players to interact with each-other and explore fixed and mobile digital objects in their immediate location.
- The vision for Maplio was conceived during the first UK lockdown of 2020 as a mobile version of multiplayer games such as Roblox or Minecraft that could allow younger players to take their gaming outdoors and connect in parks and other open spaces to play games and engage with other augmented reality content.
- It is a Javascript (not Typescript) project in its current form though provides the basis for examining a number of interesting features
Proof of concept
A working proof of concept is available at here. This started as an aid to learning realtime React and sockets and is (i) not production code, (ii) not typesafe, (iii) using props injection for shared component state. For these reasons it is useful as it is but will not be developed further.
Prototype
The next stage of development will be to develop a prototype using Next 14+ and Redux. The Javascipt POC slows down significantly when there are a large amount of artefacts on screen and this is almost certainly due to inherent inefficiencies sharing state via props injection.
The future
- Montezing location data for fun and profit
- Generating play-zones in real areas for general use.
- Partnering with business and sponsors to incentivize completion of map based activities.
- Integrating with existing map based APIs e.g. route planners