Mirage, an new augmented reality app, moves social media onto the streets

You may recognise the name Ryan Staake from the incredibly meta $100,000 video he made for rapper Young Thug track Wyclef Jean which went went viral in January, but now Ryan has announced the launch of an augmented reality app.

A shock move maybe, but less so when you learn that Ryan Staake, along with his partner Patrick Piemonte were both interface designers at Apple ten years ago.

Mirage is an iOS app which combines augmented reality’s ability to reveal an invisible world with the community power of social media. The app uses your smartphone’s camera with a small Google Maps thumbnail. To add a “mirage”, the camera can be aimed at a person, object, landscape or whatever the user wants, which the app will let the user notify with text, emojis, photos, drawings or animated GIFs. The mirage will then show up on the map as a glowing orb — along with mirages made by other users in the same area. Each mirage disappears after 24 hours, unless other users up vote it. The mirages aren’t all 3D emoji poos: if a user makes a mirage of a hashtag, tapping on it will launch Twitter.