[MUSIC PLAYING] ROSE YAO: All right,
hello, everyone. My name is Rose Yao
and I lead product for Google Maps Platform. I want thank you guys
for joining us here for our second session
at Google I/O this year. And for those of you watching
on YouTube, hello and welcome. Yesterday we talked
about how we're changing the way
we build product and what that means
for you as a developer. We also introduced a new
name, Google Maps Platform. Today I want to talk
a little bit more about why platform more
accurately represents our ambitions and the products
we want to build with you. We spent a lot of
time yesterday talking about how we're making Google
Maps Platform easy to use, simple, and scalable by
partnering with Cloud. This means one
website, one plan, one console for all your
Maps and Cloud projects and the ability to scale
seamlessly without interruption as your product grows. We also talked about
our core products, the ones we know and love
for the last 13 years, Maps, Places, and Routes. These are the foundational
building blocks of any location-based
experience. Today I want to
talk about how we go beyond the basics
with industry solutions. In particular, I want
to talk about one of our first industry solutions,
Real World Games, a Google Maps Platform. To understand what
this means, I'm going to bring Clementine up
to talk more about what exactly our offering is
and how it works. But first, I want to
talk about the journey that we took to get there
and how we really built it. So as product managers, we get
ideas from all sorts of places. But the most important one is
from you guys, our developers. In this case, about 18 months
ago, a lot of game developers are approaching
us to ask how they could use Google Maps to
build real world games and whether we have a
product to support them. We were intrigued. But honestly, up
until this point, we are never
investigated where really takes to build a
product from the grounds up just for a particular
use case or industry. All of our core products were
designed to be universal. So to do this right, we
interviewed dozens of top game developers in the world. We asked them what they
wanted to build and why, what tools they used, how
they ran their business, and what success really
looked like for them. Once you got a basic
picture of what type of game they wanted to build and
what success looked like, we got deeper into problems
that Google Maps can really help them solve. From there, we worked
closely with a small group of developers who gave
us regular feedback and helped us test every build. There are also
developers who are launching with us this summer-- so coming soon to
mobile screen near you. The result is our
View One product, which helps with two
core use cases that are unique to understanding
of the real world. First is world building. We build an SDK that
allows developers to build beautiful
fantasy worlds based on Google's understanding
of the real world. Second is mission planning. We answer what seems like
a very simple question. What is the best place
to place a game no matter where you are in the world? And that's how the Playable
Locations API was born. And Clementine will talk
about how that's not quite as simple as it sounds. This is the type of industry
solution and partnership we want to have with
you, our developers, on Google Maps Platform. So now that you know
our journey here, I'd love to welcome Clementine
up to talk about the product and how it works. [APPLAUSE] CLEMENTINE JACOBY:
Awesome, thank you, Rose. And hello, Mountain View. My name is Clementine Jacoby. And I'm the product manager
for the gaming offering that Rose just introduced. So this product is
hot off the press. We actually
announced it in March at the Game Developers
Conference in San Francisco. And it's been
overwhelming to see the response from the
developer community so far. It's super, super exciting
to see the range of ideas that developers want to bring
to the real world stage. So today I'm here to
actually dive a bit deeper into the product and tell
you what we've built. But to do that, I have
to take you back to 1972. So raise your hand if
you've ever played "Pong?" OK, so almost everybody. I want you to think about
the game world in "Pong." It's a two-dimensional
world and a single screen. And this is where
gaming started. Later, those single
screens became one of many, part of still two
dimensional but more complex game worlds like we saw
in "Super Mario Bros." And today there's this
ever increasing demand to model game worlds as more and
more realistic 3D environments on bigger and bigger scales. So game developers
invest huge amounts of time, energy, and
money in this problem, in developing game worlds. And we at Google Maps
were surprised to discover that they spend about
as much energy as we do on modeling a world for
their users to explore. Modeling this all by
hand can produce really breathtaking results, but
it's also very expensive. And it's getting more
and more expensive as we scale this problem up. And so we're
constrained by that. As an example, the game world
and "Grand Theft Auto 5," which is one of the richest
and biggest game worlds ever created, was about as
big as downtown Manhattan at launch. But what if we could scale the
art of creating game worlds? What if we could create game
worlds in which detail didn't have to be balanced with size? Hold that thought. In parallel to that progression,
mobile phones have gotten good-- like, really good-- good enough that developers
can start to convincingly blend realities. And across the mobile
ecosystem, we're seeing digital content brought
into the physical world by smartphones that
are now powerful enough to do this blending of reality. And Google Maps
specializes in reality. For over a decade
now, we have been building our model of the
world, capturing the complexity of the real world, bringing
it to your smartphone so that you can explore
no matter where you are. So game worlds are getting
bigger and more realistic. Phones are getting
better and more powerful. And as Rose said, lots and
lots of game developers were coming to Google
Maps asking for a product. So we looked at the demand. We looked at the momentum. And we decided that
we wanted to pitch in. So we set out to create
an offering specifically for gaming to help
developers build games based on the real world
powered by Google Maps data and backed by Google
Maps infrastructure. We turned the real world
into your playground, allowing you to take
the richness of reality as your starting point. Before I dive deeper,
I just want to show you a quick, 30-second video. This should have audio. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] [DRAGON ROARING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK] All right, so
there's obviously-- [APPLAUSE] Thanks. There's a lot of magic happening
in that 30-second video. But I'm going to
break it down for you in the rest of this talk. So with this product,
we really wanted to both build something
that gave developers the control that they
were after but was also easy to get started with. And so, like Rose said,
we went and talked to lots of developers
about how to strike that very elusive balance
of control and ease of use. And from those conversations,
what we learned is that there are three key
things that developers really want from us. The first one is
sort of obvious. They want access to Google
Maps data, that rich, accurate, and living model
of the real world. Now critically, our
data is really fresh. We make 25 million
updates a day to this map to reflect the pace at
which the world is changing. And it's all backed by
the same infrastructure that serves billions of daily
requests to Google Maps. The second piece
is that developers wanted the real world
in the game engines that they were
already using where they could leverage a
whole ecosystem of tools for game development. So we brought the
real world into Unity, which is the most popular engine
for creating mobile games. Our SDK does all of the
heavy lifting for you, no Google Maps expertise needed. This allows game
developers to focus really on what they do best,
which is creating rich and immersive game play. The third piece, I want to
spend a little more time on. The third piece is that we
help you design interactions around real world places. And this is a really
fascinating technical challenge it turns out. To understand how
hard this is, I want you to think about
designing a scavenger hunt. It's up to you to decide
where players need to go and what they need to
do when they get there. That's already sort
of hard, as anyone who's designed a
scavenger hunt knows. But now imagine that you're
trying to design that scavenger hunt around a city on the
other side of the world that you've never
been to before. That's harder. And now imagine that you
need to expand that scavenger hunt from one city to every
town and suburb on the planet. That's the challenge that
you're up against when creating a global-scale
location-based game. Doing this well
requires knowing a lot about the players' environment,
no matter where they are. Because no matter
where they are, you want to find things that
are unique and interesting about the area around them. So you need to know things
like, what do people take pictures of? What do they ask
for directions to? Which areas are
vibe-y and interesting that players might
enjoy exploring? Which ones are off
the beaten path that you should place rare
treasures at and reward players for finding? You'll want to know
all of those things. But just knowing all
of it isn't enough, because you also have to find
a sensible way of prioritizing between all these
signals to find the best place for your
player at that point in time and space. And as a bonus, these things
are constantly changing. So a street that's
bustling during the day might be abandoned at night. A busy mall might turn into a
restricted construction site. And they do all the time. Plus, even if you worked
this all out once, it's still not enough-- and this is the
sad spoiler alert-- because it can take years
to build a good game. And so you need
something that's going to be challenging and
dynamic for years, too, which means that
these experiences have to be somewhat dynamic. They have to change over time. Hopefully, I've illustrated that
this is a really hard problem. So now I'm going to talk about
how we help you solve it. And in short, we've built
a really special product specifically for this use case. It's called the
Playable Locations API. Its charter is to help
developers find the best places to play games
anywhere in the world. So we start by combing the
Earth looking for places to stage interactions. These could be businesses,
or public spaces, or areas of historical
or cultural interest. The important thing
is that we start with getting sufficient
coverage so that your game will be interesting no matter
where in the world your user opens their
phone to play the game. The next, very important
step is that we get rid of all the bad points. So we make sure that there
aren't points in water, or in the middle of big
roads, or anywhere else it's inappropriate
for playing games. And it turns out
that the world is full of places that
aren't very playable and often for very
non-obvious reasons. Cemeteries, landfills,
emergency room entrances, these are all bad places to
play but for, like, different and nuanced reasons. So we have to figure that out. Now that we've gotten
rid of the bad points, we need to rank every
place in the world by how playable is, which
is also non-trivial. So we take into
account a huge range of signals in deciding
how playable a point is. But one signal that
developers really care about is recognizability. Because your player is
not going to have fun if they can't find
the place that you're trying to get them to go. So we use a vast
array of signals to determine what the
most recognizable places around your player are. And then we rank those
places by prominence, which is represented by
the big, blue dots here. Now we also recognize that
the best places to play, they are going to vary
depending on the kind of game that you want to make. So we let you
tailor your request to find the places that will
work for your particular game, for the experience
you want to create. You can set up
rules, and filters, and choose the places
that are appropriate for your particular game. And I'll show you a bit
more of that later on. But here's an example. You may want to direct young
players to busy social spaces where they can interact
with their friends. Or maybe, instead,
your game is designed to get players to move. And so you place collectibles
along jogging tracks and in public parks. Or maybe your game is designed
to sort of seamlessly fit into users' everyday lives. And so you center game
play around popular cafes, commuting paths, busy
thoroughfares, et cetera. This choice is up to you. We give you that
control to create whatever experience you want. And then we help you do
that at global scale. This is possible, because
the API gives you metadata about each playable location. So this means that you can
control the types of places that appear in your game and
the types of game objects that appear at each
sort of location. So I'll give you a
very literal example. Let's say that you interpret
the real world place type super literally and place
treasure chests at banks, previsions at grocery stores,
and power ups at doctors offices. The result would be a game that
works as well in downtown Tokyo as it does in a Sydney suburb
or in the rural United States. This is pretty cool. And getting to this
end state manually is virtually impossible. These design challenges require
a detailed understanding of your players
context and environment no matter where they are. But with this Playable
Locations API, you can build your game
once, design it once, and know that it'll
work everywhere that Google Maps does in over
220 countries around the world. That's a lot of
things that you don't have to worry about
and billions of things that you don't have to do. Instead, you focus on
the what of creating exciting experiences while we
help you figure out the where. OK, so that is the
first component. The second component
that I want to talk about is the Maps Unity SDK. So now we're going
to look at some maps. Imagine now that you're
building the game world or the environment that
all of those interactions are going to take place in. The very first thing you need
is high-quality maps data. To help you with that piece,
we bring the real world into Unity. Let's take a look. This is Manhattan
rendered by the Maps Unity SDK in a demo app that we
put together for this talk. Our SDK makes it easy to
turn this blank canvas into a stylized
game environment. Here's an example. Notice how custom
textures have been applied to buildings, parks, and roads
to create this futuristic look and feel. We give you fine-grained
control over this process by modeling each map feature
as a separate game object. What that means is that
what was previously a blank street corner could
be a sci-fi adventure, a medieval setting, or
really anything else that you dream up. Now every game object is
annotated with metadata. This allows you to
make styling decisions based on the real world. Since this is a
candy land, I might decide to make shops, chocolate
bars, or turn restaurants into gingerbread. Changing the heights
of buildings, it's really easy, too. And through simple
customizations like these, you can create a
game world that's connected to the real world
but has your own look and feel. OK, now we're going to marry
that 3D world with the Playable Locations API that I
just told you about. So here the green dots
represent playable locations around the player. Let's turn the prominent
ones into mission points so that our players have
somewhere interesting nearby to play. And these will be represented
by funky rainbows, obviously. Now because you
get metadata, you can also control what types of
objects appear at what types of places. So for example, we
could place candy stands at real world stores. Or as another example, we could
place gummy bear characters at real world restaurants. And now, if we were to switch
back to our fantasy theme, these could instead be
dragons and treasure chests, or in our futuristic theme,
spaceships and floating loot. But whatever your
game, you're focused on the fun part of
creating rich and engaging game play while we do the rest. Keep in mind that this is all
happening inside of Unity. And so if I press
Stop here, you can see that the scene is empty,
because this is all being created dynamically at runtime. We include lots
of other features to help you build
your game, as well, like nine slicing for
texturing buildings, decorators for adding gargoyles,
or parapets, or other objects to roofs, borders for
simulating contact shadows. And we include the names
of roads and buildings. We also integrate with
Unity's lighting system, which helps you create a
beautiful day/night cycle. And we support Unity's level
of detail system, which means that we automatically fade
out distant objects to maximize mobile performance. [MUSIC PLAYING] But most importantly,
Unity is a physics engine, which means that you can now
use the real world's geometry in any 3D physical space game. [MUSIC PLAYING] [APPLAUSE] The spaceship always
gets the applause. OK, enough about features. Next, I'm going to show you
some examples of just how far you can push this platform. So the technique used
to create this scene is a little different from
the previous examples. In this case,
procedural rules were used to assemble a city based
on the real world's layout. Below, we can see
cars driving around, and lampposts, and power lines. And as we zoom in, you
can start to see just how detailed this
game world really is. There are cafe tables,
shopfronts, people arguing. This technique is
more sophisticated. But it's that same
semantic model of the real world that
makes it possible. Let's look at another example. This scene looks
totally different, but it's using the
same technique. The way the buildings
work is really cool. They assemble themselves
from modular components to create a stylistic
interpretation of the real world. Or to put it another
way, the cityscape is grown organically to
match the real world. What's really
incredible about this is that these examples
were all created by one developer in a matter of weeks. And so what you
can see is that he was able to achieve this
insane level of detail in a really short
amount of time. I want to talk about one more
example before we move on. This is a road running
through Glacier National Park in Montana. Here, the trees,
rocks, and vegetation were all procedurally
generated down to individual blades of grass. Elevation data was brought
into the Maps Unity SDK to create this vast,
open world environment complete with mountains, roads,
towns, animals, and wilderness areas. And what we really
like about this example is that it shows that you're
not limited to urban centers when building these games. All right, this is the most
exciting part of the talk. Now that you've seen
the product in action, I'm going to tell you a little
bit about what developers are already creating. So for the last year,
we've been working with a small set of developers
to refine this offering with folks who wanted to build
games launching this year. Today I'm going to show
you three of those games. First up, we have
"Jurassic World Alive." This is the second installment
of Ludia's "Jurassic World" series created in partnership
with Universal Studios. In this game, players are part
of the Dinosaur Protection Group and use the game
to search for, find, and rescue dinosaurs. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] [LARGE FOOTSTEPS] [DINOSAUR ROARING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK] All right, here's a shot
from inside the game. So in "Jurassic World
Alive," visual contrast was really, really
important to the developer. So they limited the
building heights so that the dinosaurs
were the first thing that players saw on the map. Let's take a closer
look at the game play. So Ludia, the developer
for this game, uses the Playable Locations
API to spawn dinosaurs based on their actual
characteristics and behavior. So you'll get some
dinosaurs that spawn at certain
times of the day and others that only spawn
in certain kinds of areas. For example, you might find some
very toothy dinosaurs hanging around your dentist's office. "Jurassic World Alive" also
features some really cool AR game play powered by
ARCore on Android. And when it comes to safety,
"Jurassic World Alive" spared no expense. By using the Playable
Locations API, they were able to help players
avoid unplayable locations and stay safe, while
also encouraging players to meet up at POIs,
which introduced this social component
into their game. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] [END PLAYBACK] OK, next up we have
"Ghostbusters World," a location-based
AR collection game built by Next Stage
in collaboration with Publisher FourThirtyThree. "Ghostbusters World" features
first-person shooter mechanics. It also allows players
interact in real time as they capture
and collect ghosts. [MUSIC PLAYING] Here's a shot from
inside their game. Notice the London Eye
in the background. High-fidelity landmarks
really help orient the player in their surroundings. And they instantly
make the game feel connected to the real world [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [MUSIC PLAYING] [GUN SHOTS] [END PLAYBACK] Finally, we have "The
Walking Dead, Our World" built by Next Games and
based on AMC's mega-hit. This is a location-based
AR survival game where players experience the
real world after the zombie apocalypse. In this game, players need
to explore the real world, battle walkers, form alliances
with other survivors, and build safe havens. Let's take a closer look. Here you're seeing the
world inside the game. And you can see that it's
abandoned and crumbling. So this sort of
gives you the sense that you're in the
zombie apocalypse and allows you to see
your familiar world in an unfamiliar context. Here's what Next Game
said about their map. "From the get go, we wanted
to heavily customize the map. We have a unified look
throughout the game, which is important for creating
an immersive experience. We love the buildings
and landmarks the most! Especially in
bigger cities, it's unbelievable how rich and
recognizable they are. They truly make our
game feel alive. And there's so many things
we want to do in the future. We've barely
scratched the surface with what the map
can provide us." One cool thing to
note here is the way they squashed the buildings
as the player approaches. I think this gives the map a
really open feel, while you can still see the real
world heights of buildings further away. Now notice that our player
here is surrounded by walkers. Next Games has used the
Playable Locations API so you create a lot of
variance in their missions. It was really
important to them to be able to change game play
as much and as often as they wanted to
to actually match their players' daily routines. So Next Games used
our API to put points where players already were. One big surprise
for Next Games was that every country in the world
comes with its own bespoke set of considerations. So as one example,
consider Finland. Finland is where an
Next Games is based. And in Finland,
they have a concept called the freedom
to roam, which means that anyone can freely
enter any forested area, no matter who owns it, as long
as it's not someone's backyard. This results in vast,
playable areas in Finland. On the other hand, in the US,
you don't want people entering cornfields that are
privately owned-- or in Asia, rice paddies-- and trampling and ruining
the crops because they're hunting zombies. So what this means is
that it's not actually enough to know that
a place is a forest. You have to know
what a forest means in that context and country. And it's not enough to know
that something is a field. You have to know if it's
a field of grass that's great for walking or if it's a
delicate rice patty that could be ruined by zombie hunters. This is a really big
challenge, but it's one that's made easier with
the Playable Locations API. All of these games
are coming soon, along with lots of others. We can't wait to
play them and to see what you'll build, as well. So I'm just going to step
back and summarize now. With this offering, we want
to make it easy for developers to do four things. First, create dynamic
experiences at global scale. You'll have access to
hundreds of millions of 3D buildings,
points of interest, landmarks, roads, and parks
to form the foundation of your game world. And this all relies on that
same model of the world that Google Maps has
been building since 2005, so you'll have fresh and
accurate data no matter where your players are. Second, completely
customize your game world. You can turn an entire
river into a lava flow, fill parks with trees, oceans
with waves, whatever you want. You can do simple things like
change colors or textures. But you can also be
much more involved and swap entire
features out for prefabs like you're seeing here. Third, design game play
around real world places. We talked about this a lot. Find the right locations
for each type of mission, character, and in-game reward. Drive your players
to popular places or take them off
the beaten path. That choice is up to
you, and either way, will help you create your unique
game play at global scale. And finally, deliver rich
experiences at huge scale. Relying on Google's
infrastructure and serving capacity means
faster response times, scale on demand, and
the peace of mind that your games are
going to just work. We're really excited
about the possibilities, and I hope you are, too. And with that, I'm going
to hand it back to Rose. Thank you. ROSE YAO: Awesome. Thank you, Clementine. Thank you, Clementine,
for showing us just how this product works
and the problems we're solving for game developers. I have to admit, I've
been pretty addicted to helping with the
zombie apocalypse. So you'll find me
routinely on my commute and at home watching TV
and helping clear zombie infestations. And I hope you guys will join
me soon, because I need help. As I mentioned in
the beginning, we realize that this is
the type of product that we can do more and more
of as industry spawn up, really focus on, how do we
interact with the real world? We're excited to partner
with you guys developers. We're excited to do more
solutions like this. If your imagination is
running wild, so is ours. So please come talk to us. So if you want to sign up
and build a game with us, please go to our website,
cloud.google.com/maps platform/gaming, to fill out
a quick form to tell us what you're building. The form is pretty simple. But don't worry. We'll be in contact to ask
you more about your game and to help you get started. We're really excited
to work with you guys. But this is new
territory for us. So we're starting by working
with a smaller set the game studios. That doesn't mean that
we won't be in touch. So please, summit your contact
info and be patient with us. And to talk to us
in person today, we will be having
office hours at 1:30. So at that, Clementine
and I just wanted to say-- CLEMENTINE JACOBY: Thank you. ROSE YAO: Thank you, guys. [MUSIC PLAYING]
