When we started building OMNIVERSE: Ascension, one question kept coming back to us during design sessions: what does it actually feel like to be a hero?
Not in a menu. Not on a map screen. In the world you're already standing in.
That question pushed us toward augmented reality — not as a gimmick, but as a natural extension of something we were already doing. If your steps power your hero. If your workouts earn you CAPS. If your real-world activity is already threaded into the game's economy... then the world around you is already part of the OMNIVERSE. It made sense to let you see it that way, too.
This post walks through our thinking — and some of the technical decisions — behind how AR fits into Ascension. We'll be honest about where things stand and what we're working toward.
STARTING FROM WHAT'S ALREADY IN YOUR POCKET
The first and most important decision we made was this: no additional hardware required.
No headsets. No glasses. No peripherals. Just the phone you're already carrying.
Modern smartphones — both iOS and Android — ship with capable camera systems, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and depth-sensing capabilities that make lightweight AR possible without any additional setup. ARKit on iOS and ARCore on Android have matured considerably, and the gap between what's technically achievable and what feels natural to a player has narrowed enough to work with.
That constraint — phone only — wasn't a limitation we reluctantly accepted. It was a design principle we chose. Ascension is built around the idea that heroism lives in your daily life, not in equipment you have to buy. Requiring a headset would contradict everything Heroic Momentum stands for.
HOW AR CONNECTS TO THE OMNIVERSE LAYER
In Ascension, the world has two layers. There's the OMNIVERSE — the persistent multiverse your hero inhabits, with its factions, campaigns, nemeses, and lore. And there's the physical world you move through every day.
Heroic Momentum already bridges those two layers. Your steps, your workouts, your daily movement — they generate CAPS and Omni-Credits in the OMNIVERSE. You're already affecting the game world by living your life.
AR extends that bridge visually.
Rather than being purely an abstract system (“you walked 12,000 steps today”), AR gives the OMNIVERSE a presence in your physical space. Your environment can become a mission context. A parking lot becomes a crisis zone. A park becomes a FAFO encounter location. The neighborhood you walk through every morning becomes a territory your hero actually patrols.
We're not rendering persistent 3D structures on every street corner — that's a level of infrastructure that doesn't serve the game we're making. What we're doing is more targeted: AR-enhanced moments tied to specific mission types and encounters, triggered contextually, anchored to your physical location via GPS and camera orientation.
THE FAFO ENCOUNTER LAYER
FAFO — Fuck Around and Find Out — is already the most improvisational part of Ascension. You step into an encounter without knowing exactly what's coming. The difficulty tier sets the stakes; the AI GM generates the narrative on the fly.
That structure maps naturally to an AR experience.
When a FAFO encounter fires in an AR-enabled context, the encounter narrative can reference your actual surroundings. The AI GM isn't just generating a generic street fight — it knows you're outside, it has a sense of the environment type (urban, suburban, open space), and it can frame the encounter accordingly. The physical world provides the stage; the OMNIVERSE provides the antagonist.
On the visual side, encounter indicators, threat overlays, and outcome animations can be anchored to real-world surfaces rather than rendered purely on a 2D screen. Your d20 roll doesn't just produce a number — it produces a result that plays out against the backdrop of wherever you're standing.
The technical implementation here leans on ARKit/ARCore's plane detection and world-space anchoring. We detect horizontal surfaces (ground, pavement) and use them as anchors for encounter visuals. It's not trying to be something cinematic that requires studio-level production. It's trying to make a random encounter feel like it happened here, in the place you actually are.
MISSIONS AND AR CONTENT
Campaigns in Ascension are chapter-based, AI-driven, and designed to unfold over multiple sessions. Most campaign content is narrative — you and your AI GM working through a story together.
Some missions, though, are built around doing something in the world — not just reading and responding to narrative, but physically moving, arriving at a location, or completing a real-world action that feeds back into the mission state.
We're building mission types that incorporate AR presentation without requiring the player to be somewhere specific or do something complicated. The design principle is that AR should lower the barrier to immersion, not raise it. If triggering an AR moment requires you to stand still for 30 seconds while the app calibrates, we've already lost.
What we're targeting instead:
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Encounter arrival sequences — When you reach a mission waypoint, a brief AR overlay frames the scene before the narrative begins.
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Threat visualization — Enemy indicators rendered in world-space during combat encounters, giving positional weight to what the AI GM is describing.
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Victory moments — Outcome animations anchored to your environment so that winning a crisis-tier encounter feels like it happened in your world, not a generic game UI.
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Heroic Momentum celebrations — When you hit your daily step goal or log a workout, a short AR moment acknowledges it in the world around you — not just an app notification.
None of this requires you to be somewhere special. It works in your living room, on your commute, in the gym parking lot. The phone handles the spatial anchoring; the AI GM handles the narrative context; you bring the location.
WHAT WE'RE NOT DOING (AND WHY)
It's worth being direct about the things we decided against.
Persistent world objects — the idea of leaving AR markers at physical locations for other players to find — is technically possible but operationally complex in ways that don't serve the game we're making right now. It introduces moderation challenges, hardware variation issues, and a dependency on player density in a given area that doesn't match how Ascension is built. It might be a direction we revisit. It's not where we're starting.
Full environmental occlusion and real-time physics — the kind of AR that places a fully rendered 3D character in your space and has it interact with furniture, shadows, and depth — requires a level of device capability and battery consumption that would cut off too many players. We're making deliberate choices to keep the AR layer light enough to work well on mid-range hardware, not just flagship devices.
Mandatory AR — none of the AR content is required to play the game. FAFO encounters, campaigns, and Heroic Momentum all function completely in standard mode. AR is an enhancement layer, not a gate.
THE STACK BEHIND IT
For the technically curious: Ascension is built on React Native with Expo. AR integration on this stack isn't as plug-and-play as it would be in a native Swift or Kotlin app, but the tooling has improved. We're working with ViroReact and direct bridge modules to ARKit/ARCore for the core spatial anchoring, with our own layer connecting AR session state to the rest of the game.
The AI GM doesn't need to know anything about AR to work within it. It generates narrative. The AR layer presents that narrative in physical space. They're decoupled, which keeps both systems cleaner and makes it easier to iterate on the AR presentation without touching the story generation logic.
Location context, when used, is handled with standard device GPS. We don't require fine-grained location beyond what's needed to establish “you're outside” vs. “you're stationary indoors” for encounter framing purposes.
WHERE THIS GOES
We're not announcing a release date for AR mission content in this post. What we can say is that the architecture supports it, the design principles are settled, and the constraint — phone only, no extra hardware — holds.
The OMNIVERSE is already in your neighborhood.
You're already earning power by moving through it. The AR layer is just helping you see what's always been there.
More on this as it develops.