July 19, 2021 – Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping service, has recently formally announced that it is working with London-based games studio PRELOADED to develop a world-scale Augmented Reality (AR) game that will be designed to engage family audiences with the outdoors.
The game will be built upon Ordnance Survey’s extensive mapping and will use geospatial data to deliver contextual experiences that drive exploration of the world. We covered the contract award, which was announced in November last year, however this is the first time that Ordnance Survey has published news of the award itself. The original contract award value was for a total of GBP £300,000 and was set to last a duration of three years.
Nick Giles, Managing Director of OS Leisure, said: “We want to make maps fun and geo-location games and gamified apps enable their players to collectively visualise the great outdoors as they wish to experience and interact with their surroundings. It’s no longer all about what is physically present in a set location. By creating a Geo-location game of our own, this new mixture of realities gives us more opportunities to encourage people to explore and get outside more often.”
Phil Stuart, Creative Director at PRELOADED, commented: “We’re at a point where advancements in AR and geospatial technologies allow us to connect with our real world in completely new and meaningful ways. We’re so excited to work with Ordnance Survey to bring the true potential of location-based play to family audiences in the UK and beyond.”
Mike Hawkyard, Head of Mobile Games at Ordnance Survey, added: “Augmented real world locations can enhance an individual’s enjoyment of the great outdoors. Upon reaching a desired location, gamers might see a physical telephone box in front of them, but they have also reached a location where they can battle for a new PokéGym in the virtual sense,” (referring to mobile-AR game, Pokémon GO). Hawkyard continued: “This new AR game reflects an exciting opportunity by building on the success of OS Maps and raising awareness of these highly engaging outdoor experiences.”
According to Ordnance Survey, the new AR game will be complementary to OS Maps, which has more than 3.5 million users providing access to a range of features including 3D mapping, Augmented Reality tools and over 4 million routes covering 30 million miles.
Ordnance Survey is planning to launch its first game in early 2022. For more information on Ordnance Survey, click here. For more information on PRELOADED, please visit the company’s website.
Image credit: Ordnance Survey
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Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.