Development
March 12, 2025
As part of our ongoing R&D, supported by Media Cymru, we’ve been exploring what happens when the physical world becomes a launchpad for immersive digital experiences.
At the centre of this inquiry is Visual Positioning Systems (VPS), a rapidly maturing technology that allows augmented reality (AR) content to anchor to precise real-world locations with centimetre-level accuracy.
This isn’t just about pinning content to GPS coordinates. It’s about transforming space into interface, where depth, occlusion, orientation, and memory of place come together to power new forms of storytelling, play, and interaction.
Reimagining location-based AR
To understand the practical and creative implications of VPS, we developed and tested a suite of interactive AR experiences across real-world locations in Boston. These experiences ranged from multiplayer naval simulations to creative banner-making games and location-specific historical storytelling. They were powered by the latest generation of spatial tools from Niantic, giving us a direct lens into what’s possible when VPS technology becomes production-ready.
Each prototype was designed not just as a test of hardware or signal strength, but as a lived, site-specific experience. Players could see digital objects anchored to monuments, interact with historical reconstructions layered over the city, or collaborate in shared AR spaces with zero perceptible drift.
What we found
The results were unambiguous. VPS now offers a level of speed, precision, and stability that makes it viable for ambitious real-world activations, especially when paired with fast mobile networks and careful spatial planning.
- Speed: Localisation consistently completed in under 6 seconds, often while users were still reading on-screen instructions.
- Accuracy: Positional alignment was within 1–30 cm in nearly all cases, even across multiple users, enabling tightly synchronised multiplayer experiences.
- Stability: Once locked, content remained anchored even as users moved around or interacted. Most drift was negligible and recoverable in real time.
- Workflow: The scan-to-deploy process has become significantly more intuitive, with professional-grade location scanning and private asset control enabling fast iteration.
There were challenges too, unsurprisingly. Direct sunlight and reflective surfaces disrupted tracking in a few cases, and reliance on stable connectivity remains a limiting factor for wider public deployment. But these are issues of environment and scale, not of core capability.
Why this matters now
For years, geo-located AR has struggled with vague anchors, unstable placement, and inconsistent user experience. VPS changes that. With the right scan data, we can now create digital content that remembers a place, its layout, lighting, landmarks, and responds to it as if it were part of the environment.
For creative teams, that opens new possibilities:
- Location-aware storytelling
- Shared multiplayer game spaces
- Site-specific cultural exhibitions
- Persistent digital art installations
- Real-world guided tours with AR overlays
All without needing QR codes, clunky marker tracking, or pre-downloaded maps.
Building the future, one location at a time
At Sugar, we’re not just developing content for these new platforms, we’re helping define how they’ll work. Our R&D into VPS is part of a broader investigation into how infrastructure, access, and creativity intersect. Whether it’s smart content delivery systems, cloud streaming pipelines, or immersive narrative design, we’re focused on how these tools can come together to form coherent, accessible experiences that feel magical to the user.
Because the promise of immersive tech has never been about novelty. It’s about presence. And VPS is the first major step toward making that presence feel real, anywhere in the world.
You may also like this
