Ogmento CEO Brian Selzer on the power of combining AR with location-based gaming

When it comes to gaining venture funding for mobile game development, there are two hot areas at the moment, location-based gaming and augmented reality.

One reason is that they involve a lot of technology that could be used for more general purposes, while the second is no company has completely solved the problems inherent in either.

Whether that make US outfit Ogmento ambitious or plain crazy is another matter entirely, however, as it's attempting to solve both areas simultaneously.

"It's a natural combination," explains president and co-founder Brian Selzer.

"Augmented Reality (AR) is best experienced in the real world and location-based gaming is about being a place in the real world. Combined, I think we're at the dawn of a new type of gaming."

One of the reasons Selzer is so confident is that Ogmento uses vision-based AR, which doesn't rely on markers that have to be printed out in order to orient and control the experience. More complex, instead, it uses items or objects in the real world scene.

"In our Paranormal Activity games, people can draw certain symbols that act as hand drawn markers, casting much more powerful spells than they would otherwise," he says.

Now onto its third version of the experience, the game, which is also a marketing device for the horror movies, uses location to encourage play sessions.

For example, all the cinemas playing the film on the opening weekend had a hell hole spawned under then, while the AR was used for spells and well as scanning areas for ghostly activity.

It's a similar mechanic in the company's new NBA: King of the Court, which is currently available on some national app stores for iOS and Android, although not yet the core US market.

The gameplay is fairly simple: you're using your device and its camera to shoot hoops in randomly generated courts which are persistent in the real world.

But with the number of balls limited on a time basis, gaining extra ones is driven by a combination of IAP and/or visiting different locations.

"We can also do things such as generating special courts in places such as the Staples Center in LA [home of LA Lakers]," Selzer says.

The extra layer is that the best player in each court is its king (sort of akin to a mayor in Foursquare), with your number of kingships acting as the game's leaderboard rank, obviously with there being one King of the World at any time.

"The NBA really liked the idea of the social mechanic because it enables it to tap into its community, also tying into opportunities with special contests and events," Selzer points out, once again highlighting the traction available with such content, despite the additional complexity required in terms of development.