ONTOP’s ARcade Sports showed me that AR arenas can be fun

When I was at AWE Europe in Lisbon at the end of 2022, I had the opportunity of meeting with ONTOP‘s CEO Nuno Folhadela and try its very interesting solution, called ARcade Sports, which showed me that multiplayer mobile AR can be fun.

I absolutely wanted to write for you a review about this experience of mine, but then for various reasons, this post remained in my backlog for too long. Now I’m finally writing it, but remember that this hands-on refers to the status of the solution in October 2022. The experience anyway has remained mostly the same, so this review still applies. Ok, enough talking, let’s see what ARcade Sports is about!

ONTOP Arcade Sports arena

When Nuno Folhadela invited me to try its AR solution, I was pretty convinced it was a prototype he was building in some coworking with his employees. But I was wrong: actually, he has already a working product that consumers can play.

ARcade Sports is a series of location-based multiplayer AR arenas aimed at providing people with a mix between gaming and sport. People can go there and engage in multiplayer action games based on mobile AR together with their friends. The place I visited was located inside the building of a cinema, and the cinema was actually a partner of ONTOP, as we will see very soon. The arena was a rectangular space with vibrant colors, bold writings, and some screens. It looked like a small sports arena.

Nuno explained to me that the location was strategic so that ARcade Sports could give additional fun to people that come to watch a movie at the cinema. Playing is very easy: people can buy the tickets on the app (there are discounts for bulk purchases, of course), then go to the location and play the games. Every game can award coins and other collectibles, and with these ones, it is possible to have some goodies at the cinema. For instance, if you manage to grab all the possible special collectibles during all your play sessions, you have one year of free popcorn at the cinema. I’ve found this partnership with the cinema very smart: it is well-known that cinemas are finding ways to improve the experience of their visitors because always fewer people are going there, and this innovative AR game can be an ideal partner. People can come to watch a movie and then have fun with friends at the AR arena, and then maybe they win a discount for a movie ticket, so they return back to the cinema. Business-wise, this is great.

When I visited ONTOP, the company had already two locations opened in Lisbon, and was going to open its third one. And they weren’t lacking users for sure: in around 3 months, more than 5000 people had played with ONTOP’s systems. These numbers are not bad at all for a startup. Nuno told me that these results were possible because the company was investing a lot in the replayability of the games.

All of this was very cool, I always like to see an XR product getting its share of success among average customers. But I admit I was a bit doubtful about the technology it was using, that is mobile AR. While I’m very bullish about the possibilities of AR, I’m usually disappointed by the user experience offered by mobile augmented reality. So I wanted to absolutely try some games offered by ARcade Sports to see if I could have fun with them.

Hands-on ARcade Sports

Of course, I couldn’t go away without having some matches inside the arena: in the end, I was there to have some fun. Nuno was very happy to let me try his product, but I was a bit less happy that I had to challenge the creator of the games, because I was sure he would have totally destroyed me!

I tried a few games there (all made internally by the company), and the basics of them were more or less similar. I had to enter the arena, scan some markers, then the game started, and some villains appeared in the center of the arena. I was associated with a color (e.g. blue) and on the villain there were some colored targets (something like spheres), that I had to shoot if they were of the same color. So whenever I saw a blue sphere on an enemy, I had to shoot at it. If it was of another color (e.g. red), I should have left some of my teammates the duty to shoot at it. Shooting happened by pointing the crosshair at the center of the smartphone screen on the element to shoot and then tapping on the screen.

Enemies were of different kinds, and big bosses were able to cast a lot of different attacks. As all big bosses, they had different stages, and while at the beginning they may have been quite easy to handle, the more we shot at them, the more they became angry. Of course, when an attack was coming, my purpose was to physically dodge it (e.g. by squatting or running away), otherwise, my health was affected. When the health went to zero, the game didn’t end for me, but I had to go closer to my teammate, put my phone close to his ones for a few seconds, and see my health repleted.

When shot, the enemies could release some goodies, that is the coins or other collectibles that are useful to have prizes for the cinema. On the coins there was written 5G: Nuno told me that coins and other elements of the games can be branded, and the “5G” label was put there because a telco was one of the partners of the company. Sometimes goodies could also be got from chests that were available in the game, and that had to be shot, too.

The game was very dynamic, and I had to constantly run around the arena to dodge the attacks of the monsters or to get some coins. After just a few minutes, the match ended, and I and Nuno could take a picture together, shot by a camera installed in the location, and enhanced by some AR elements. After that in the app I could see some stats, including the calories burnt, the squats performed, etc… I the next screen, I could see who made the most points in the team, how many coins I collected, and so on. Together with the stats, there was the photo we had just taken together!

There is also the possibility of having the video of the gaming session recorded in a fancy way. Here for instance you can find mine (I love it):

General impressions

I came out from playing the game with very positive impressions, but also with some doubts about the technology used.

Let’s start with the biggest downside: mobile AR is not the best technology for this kind of games. I understand the reason for using mobile phones when targeting average consumers. Asking people to wear glasses on the face can be felt as intrusive, plus the glasses are expensive, still rough, and they should be cleaned between different sessions. Mobile phones are much better in this sense. But mobile AR offers just a tiny window through which you can see the fantasy world where the action game takes place. You have no idea what is happening outside of that window. So for instance sometimes I was focused on collecting some coins, and I couldn’t notice that the evil boss was casting an attack. Or I couldn’t have a view of the full character of the big boss and understand exactly what was the best strategy to attack it.

Even shooting per see was quite difficult: aiming with mobile AR, while at the same time I had to move fast and dodge attacks, was not easy at all. Sometimes I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t aim properly. And tapping on a screen to shoot feels much less satisfying than pulling the trigger on the controllers of my Meta Quest 2.

The last problem was that since my onboarding had been quite fast, not always I was understanding what I had to do. During the game, lots of times Nuno had to suggest to me what I had to do at that moment (duck, dodge, shoot) because I was not understanding completely what was happening around me (also because of the limited FOV).

Apart from these technical issues, I had fun. The game made me move a lot, and after three matches I was literally sweating. This means that the “sport” component of the game was working.

I also loved the fact that this game fosters team dynamics, both collaborative and competitive. When I was playing with Nuno, we were continuously talking about what we should have done to defeat the monsters together: he was also warning me about upcoming attacks since he knew his monsters very well. We were cooperating to kill the villains, but at the same time, we were also competing to get the most coins possible, and to have the highest score in the final classification. These are all good things to have in a game when a team of friends goes to play together: friendly competition is fun, and then those who lost always want to play “one more game” to have their revenge. I loved also the mechanic that when your health is depleted, you have to look for one of your teammates and go closer to him/her to see it replenished: it creates a sense of people in a team that help each other. The only problem with this mechanic is that if you are not good at playing and your health goes continuously to zero, always going close to your friends breaks the flow.

The time has also been chosen very carefully: matches are quite cheap (around €1 per ticket per person), and the time duration is very short (3-5 minutes). When the first match ended, with me losing by a lot against Nuno (damn), I was like “Is it already finished??” and I absolutely wanted an immediate rematch. This “wanting more” from me was showing that the replayability of the game was good. Probably 3 consecutive matches are the right spot to have fun with this game without getting too tired.

The multimedia material I got in the end was a good plus. I liked getting photos and videos of my matches! Even if I would have preferred to win more matches…

Conclusion

I’ve found the solution proposed by ONTOP an interesting one. AR arenas could be fun to play and also offer the advantage of being cheaper to maintain than their VR counterparts: mobile AR games require less graphics, plus the hardware is cheaper (can be provided by the users), and requires less maintenance. I’m still not totally convinced by the use of just the phones, though, because sometimes they make the game difficult to play. But the potential is there, and I think that with AR glasses it could express all its power: you can see your real friends, and fight with them against huge fantasy monsters, collaborating and competing with them at the same time.

One last point I have to make is about profitability: the ticket price for ARcde Sports is very low (around 1€ per ticket per person), and this helps in having more people become customers. Plus the partnership with the cinema is beneficial for both businesses. But usually location-based entertainment suffers from the problem of having too many people on the weekends and too few during the weekdays, and I think that this business needs many users every day to survive. But this is not easy to guarantee. Of course, sponsorships may help with revenues, and so the fact that the game can be branded is good in this sense.

Anyway, the game was fun, and I appreciated how Nuno and his team managed to make people have fun together with just a few phones. So I hope the best for him and his company. And I compliment him for having been nomineed for a potential Auggie Award!