New real estate AR game attracts thousands in Abu Dhabi

A new mobile game that lets players buy, sell, and collect rent on some of the world’s most famous buildings and landmarks has 13,621 players already making deals for ‘ownership’ of 76,476 properties in Abu Dhabi.

Landlord Go is an augmented reality game by Reality Games that uses real buildings, real people, and real prices to turn the city into a strategy game. The creators claim the game has over one million players worldwide.

This is how Landlord Go works: If a new coffee shop is opening in your neighbourhood and you think it’s poised to become the next Starbucks, put in a bid for it, and start raking in the rent payments from the crowds lined up outside the door. Players can start small, buying up local corner shops, and quickly amass a vast virtual real estate empire through continuous investing. You could even buy iconic buildings such as the United States Capitol in Washington D.C. or Big Ben in London.

Any time another player visits your property in real life, they pay you rent in the game. Each building has a daily performance metric based on real digital footprints. The more visitors your property gets the higher its value.

Players can put properties on the market, or engage in bidding wars with other players, recreating the experience of competing in the high-stakes real estate market right from their phone.

Read: Microsoft to launch cloud mobile gaming service in September, to cost $15

Reality Games says it has amassed a massive pool of data, including detailed information about more than half a billion real-world properties. Landlord Go reflects real-world values of properties using details like distance from the city centre and building amenities.

To ensure the game has the largest playing field possible, the entire world is divided into 10 billion unique plots, with help from NASA. Reality Games uses its own property data sets combined with NASA satellite scans of night-time light emissions.

To enhance realism, buildings in the game have the correct simulated height that corresponds with the real-world versions, with image recognition and location data available through the AI camera feed.

Creators Reality Games says they use a proprietary AI and data platform called Big Dots to add real-world data to desktop and mobile apps.