Why Obelisk exists

In 2012 I visited a park in Beijing with a friend. We had gone to find a geocache, an unusual one, where the story itself held the clues to each location. As we followed it I looked around at everyone else staring into their phones, and how far from the park they all seemed. Then a happy idea came to me. What if our portals into digital space, instead of pulling us out of the physical world, pulled us deeper into it? What if narrative and mystery could be layered over a real place?

So I started making rough versions of that. Written stories you followed on foot through a particular place. Landmarks held numbers, and the story had blanks where those numbers belonged. Gathered up, they added to a set of GPS coordinates, and those coordinates unlocked the next stage.

I wrote stories. I built puzzles. I set up an email account so I could answer stuck players in character. I remember being in Southeast Asia, helping people find their way across cities in China, connected to them by email and, through them, still connected to the story and the place. It was a strange feeling and it stayed with me: present without being present. There in memory, and by way of the internet.

That sat with me for years before I did anything about it.

This platform is for building digital layers of experience on top of physical space, and as the technology improves I intend to keep finding new ways to do it. I imagine a world where autonomous digital objects stake a claim to reality in every way but one: they are not physical. AI characters living out their lives in digital space, chasing mysteries, causing trouble, helping.

The world we already live in is largely a product of human imagination. Our cities, our cultures, our peculiar habits. I would like this to be one way of extending that into digital space.

The internet and social media already exist, of course. But they mostly pull us away from the place we are standing in, away from putting an ear against a tree, or a toe in a glacial lake. This is an attempt at the opposite: a way for the two to become one experience, and to bring some wonder to a brick wall, an ancient relic, a hilltop, or anywhere at all.

Luke PriddyCreator of Obelisk