Two decades of building interactive & playable worlds — from the first metaverse experiments in Second Life to XR Headset Operating System Design built by Global Enterprises.
Dreamspace has been designing games since before “metaverse” was a marketing term. What started as early virtual-world builds for brands like MTV and Audi in Second Life evolved into two decades of hands-on game design, brand systems, and launch strategy, spanning console, mobile AR, and the earliest AR/VR headsets. Today, that history runs directly through one of the industry’s most consequential AR studios: Niantic, the makers of Pokémon GO.
What We Do
Two Decades in the Room Where Games Get Built
Dreamspace’s game design practice didn’t start with a pitch deck. It began to take shape in Second Life in the 2000s, when brands like MTV and Audi were among the first to test what a persistent virtual world could do. MTV’s Cribs Digital Twin brought a television format into a 3D social space, and the Audi Virtual Racing Experience gave users a drivable brand world years before “branded gaming” was a category. From there, Dreamspace moved into full game production, creatively directing and designing the GUI stages for Def Jam Rapstar, developed by 4mm Games. As AR and VR hardware emerged, Dreamspace was building for it early, designing for the first generation of HoloLens and for mobile-powered VR on Samsung headsets, well before AR/VR development was standard agency practice.
That early XR fluency led to a long-term partnership with Niantic, the studio behind Pokémon GO. Dreamspace has supported Niantic across multiple live titles, including Pokémon GO and Ingress, and took the lead role — branding, UX/UI, and experiential design — on two of Niantic’s most high-profile launches: NBA All World, built in partnership with the NBA, and MARVEL World of Heroes, Niantic’s first game built with Marvel. Most recently, Dreamspace contributed to Niantic’s collaboration with Qualcomm on next-generation outdoor AR headset hardware — work aimed at bringing Niantic’s Lightship platform to AR glasses built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Spaces platform.
Game Mechanics & Systems Design
Good games are systems before they’re visuals. Dreamspace works at the mechanics level — defining how players progress, compete, and return, from core loops to meta-progression. On NBA All World, that meant designing an entirely new type of player card system: instead of a standard stats card, Dreamspace built a magazine-style, three-category format spanning stats, news, and lifestyle content, turning a game mechanic into a piece of hoop culture in its own right.
UX/UI Design & Prototyping
Dreamspace designs the interfaces players actually touch — map systems, points of interest, HUDs, onboarding flows, and player progression screens — then prototypes and iterates on real player behavior. For NBA All World, this meant redesigning the game’s entire UI, building out the map and POI system, and creating loading screens and interactive guides, all developed in close collaboration with Niantic Labs’ internal teams on visual treatment, UX/UI demonstration, and motion behavior. For Def Jam Rapstar, Dreamspace creatively directed and designed the GUI across multiple stages of the game.
3D Development & XR Testing
From early HoloLens builds to mobile-based VR on Samsung hardware, Dreamspace has spent years prototyping and testing inside XR constraints most studios were not yet designing for. That foundation carried into the Niantic/Qualcomm collaboration on AR headset hardware, contributing to the OS-level ecosystem work behind Niantic’s push to bring Lightship VPS to outdoor AR headsets — real-world infrastructure for AR that goes far beyond a phone screen.
Community & Global Launch Strategy
Launching a game is a campaign with a heartbeat. Dreamspace built the five-phase content strategy that carried NBA All World from launch through a full year of seasonal moments, developed around Niantic’s “GO ALL OUT” launch platform, and built for three distinct player segments — casual mobile gamers, core NBA and hoop-culture fans, and families — under one unified, accessible brand voice. The work extended into global out-of-home activation, taking over transit stations and street-level media in Paris and Barcelona before returning to blanket Boston and San Francisco ahead of launch.
User Acquisition Strategy, Content & Media Buy
Dreamspace builds UA creative and content systems designed to perform at scale, not just look good in a deck. For NBA All World, that included a full toolkit of ready-to-use creative assets and ratios for internal and external teams, a social-first content strategy across every platform and format, and original AR “drop zone” visuals developed with 8th Wall, Niantic’s WebAR studio, to drive real-world engagement at the exact moment users encountered the brand.
Branding for Game IP
Game design at Dreamspace has never been a single discipline. It is mechanics and brand working from the same brief, marketing built to perform at the scale a global launch demands, and interface design tested against real players, not assumptions. That range, informed by two decades in the room with studios like Niantic and IP as recognizable as the NBA and Marvel, is what lets Dreamspace move fluidly between systems design, visual identity, and user acquisition without losing the thread that connects them. The result is games that feel considered from the first tap to the thousandth session, and launches built to hold an audience’s attention long after the first download.