Category: Mobile Gaming

The company has already achieved successes with customers over smartphones, and now it is moving into glasses.

After having successfully accumulated a massive audience of smartphone users to use augmented reality apps in order to engage with products in the real world, Blippar has now released a platform designed for Google Glass.

The Blippar platform for Google Glass was created with developers in mind in mobile game creation.

This platform is meant to provide developers with a new way to create their own augmented reality mobile games. Blippar’s chief executive, Ambarisha Mitra, first revealed the Games for Glass platform at an AR trade show in Santa Clara, California, called the Augmented World Expo. The games would activate when looking at something in the real world while using Glass to be able to interact with it. The example that was given was in the form of a can of Pepsi.

The platform allows an ad on a real world product to provide an augmented reality game experience.

When the Glass was aimed at the soda can with a soccer ad that was Blippar enabled, an app activated and then the wearer could use his or her eyes to aim the soccer ball at the goal and then kick it. The idea is to use an ad created in the physical world to provide the device user with an interactive digital AR experience.

Blippar intends to release its Games for Glass software development kit (SDK) in just under a month and a half. Then, developers will be able to use it to create a larger number of games that will take advantage of the Google Glass experience and its unique ability to use virtual image overlays on the view of the real world.

For example, it could allow someone to add virtual paint to a real world object. Then, when another Glass wearer who uses the Blippar augmented reality app happens to see that object, they would also be able to spot the new color or design that was added by the original person. Mitra explained that through this technology “we can become the bridge from physical to digital.”

Nix Hydra Inc. has raised millions to expand its successful game Egg Baby.

The mobile gaming Los Angeles-based startup, co-founded in 2012 by former Yale classmates Lina Chen and Naomi Ladizinsky, that creates mobile games made by females for females, has raised $5 million from Foundry Group to grow their popular game Egg Baby, as well as launch additional titles.

Egg Baby became a huge hit among young women without marketing.

The game was launched in 2013, was well received and gained quite the following among women and teen girls. The inspiration for Egg Baby came from a school experiment that assigned students to care for a raw egg as if it were their baby. Even though there was no marketing for the game and the initial version was quite rough, it was a hit.

In the game, a player hatches an egg, which produces a unique creature that gives gifts. The type of creature that hatches depends on how the player interacts and cares for the egg (ex. washes, dresses, feeds, tickles it, etc.). If the player forgets to care for the egg, it will die. A major reason why the game has achieved a massive following is players like to show off their creature and many new users download the game after seeing what their friends have shared.

The game has received 9 million downloads. “We didn’t think it was going to be that popular,” said Lina Chen. According to Chen, approximately 85 percent of players are female and the majority of players are under 25 years old.

Nix Hydra will continue its female-focused mobile gaming objective.

Naomi Ladizinsky commented that in the mobile gaming industry there have been a lot of games “with the same ideas iterated on over and over again”, such as games that fall into the trendy battle, quest, and runner game genres. “It’s a tech dude’s perspective,” she said. Nix Hydra anticipates it will hire an additional 20 people over the course of the next year and will use the funding it has received to launch two new games and develop a franchise around Egg Baby.