Monkey Mayhem

Engaging movement-based geospatial AR mini-games for IRL businesses

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Inspiration

In today's digital age people are constantly on their phones and forget that there is a whole physical world out there for them to explore. We wanted to get people back to moving and exploring the spaces around them like in the good old days. By leveraging gaming, AR, and web3 tech we saw that we could engage and inform users about IRL spaces in a fun healthy way while creating an acquisition funnel for struggling brick-and-mortar businesses.

What it does

Our application enables businesses to inform, engage, and reward customers in IRL spaces through interactive AR mini-games. These minigames can help businesses boost sales, better engage customers, promote healthy movement, and even foster tight-knit communities around their brand that extend beyond physical business locations.

How we built it

We utilized web-based AR with 8th Wall to build our AR minigames, Solana/Quicknode to power our authentication/NFTs, ammo.js for game physics, Lightship VPS for our positioning, PostgreSQL for our database, and React as the core framework to pull all the components together.

Challenges we ran into

Weaving different AR experiences with different user interactions into one cohesive AR experience was quite difficult due to the variety of components involved. Also achieving optimal UX when a complex multipart digital experience has to be combined with the physical world was a challenge we had to overcome.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to create a truly seamless onboarding experience using email to onboard web2 users to receive web3 NFTs that are redeemable for IRL rewards. Also, we managed to get physics working to make our AR minigames more interactive.

What we learned

Tying together a ton of new technology like web3 and AR is no small task. Not biting off more than you can chew, starting small, and building up from there step by step is crucial to successfully integrate completely different pieces of technology together to form one complex application.

What's next for Monkey Mayhem

We'd love to expand beyond monkey-themed minigames to further develop templates, games, and tools that can help small businesses easily create and monetize their own IRL AR experiences. We hope that this in turn will enable people to explore the real world while more deeply engaging with brands.

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