Mirage World Sticks Ephemeral Memes in Real World Locales via iPhone (Without ARKit)

Advertisers must love when their commercials go viral. Take for instance the Esurance commercial where an elderly woman completely misunderstands Facebook jargon.

"That's not how it works! That's not how any of this works!" And a meme is born.

Well, what if I told you there was an app that let users turn real-life walls into digital walls for sharing content?

That's what Mirage World does with its eponymous iOS app they released last week. The app enables what they call "virtual graffiti," which is a very apt description. The iOS-only app lets users take photos of landmarks in the real world, adorn them with emojis, doodles, photos, and text a la Snapchat, and then "post" their creations, called mirages, to that location. Moreover, content creators can insert hashtags that others can click on to search Twitter.

Create your own “story” through Mirage World.

Then post it to a “wall” in the real world for others to find.

Create your own “story” through Mirage World.

Then post it to a “wall” in the real world for others to find.

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Other users are able to find the geocached content when they are in the landmark's vicinity, and they can view the LOLs through their app's camera view. They can then take a photo of the mirage and share it to other apps. Unlike actual graffiti, though, the virtual version disappears after 24 hours or less, but visitors can upvote a mirage to extend its stay.

Content discovery appears to rely on both coordinates and image recognition. In limited testing, a mirage would not show up at various angles compared to the captured location; the camera had to point at the object at the same angle at which the original photo was taken.

While the app stitches together features from various apps – photo editing and stickers from Snapchat, geolocation from Pokémon Go, upvoting from Reddit (or Digg before it), Mirage World has the makings of being the "next big thing," particularly after drawing the attention Wired.

The past 24 hours have been such a whirlwind! It's been so exciting to see what you've all added on top of reality.

Mirage World is the creation of app developer Patrick Piemonte, content creator Ryan Staake, and web developer Derek Reynolds.

Next Reality reached out to the developers to see what they had in store for the app once ARKit in iOS 11 goes live this fall, but we had not received a response at time of publication. We'll update this post if we hear back from them.

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Cover image via Mirage World Vimeo