Frequently Asked Questions

Hidelight is here for you to share and engage with information and media organized around you in the world, accessible through your device using augmented reality.

Hidelight encourages you to share your love community, to leverage your local expertise, and help travelers on their way through your world. It will help you feel like a local as you experience what others share as you travel amidst theirs. I hope Hidelight will encourage you learn about the world by experiencing the art, sounds and information that people share, and encourage you to leave your own footprints around the world.

I assume you want to dig right in, so hold down the circle in the center of the screen and hopefully the rest of the app will reveal itself to you.

No, you can start by opening up the app and looking around, hopefully somebody already blazed a trail around you and left you things nearby for you to see. Alas, since Hidelight is new that’s not likely. If you’d like to do more than browse you’ll need to create an account, then you can add your content to anywhere in the world AR world, find and share with your friends, come together to create projects and share your love for your neighbourhood.

For now you can add different types of images, we recommend PNGs as they tend to blend in better than other formats, audio and video. If you don’t have anything to add on your phone try out the library function under templates to find content that other users have uploaded.

After holding down the + in the middle of the screen you’ll be prompted to contribute. Once inside the contribution screen you can choose from a few different types of content. You’ll have to choose a title, layer, size and a few other details for your content.

Highlight is around to help encourage you to make connections that you might not otherwise make, but obviously we know that friends are the glue that make the world work. So we have a way to connect with them. Click on the little human silhouette on the bottom right of the screen to find ways that you can communicate with your friends. You can connect with people you know by clicking on their content,  hitting the friend  button and answering their security question, or adding content of your own into the world as a friend request. friend content will stay live for 5 minutes, and anybody who is around you can click on it and be a part of your community.

We envision the Hidelight world will come to look like archaeologists experience strata. We want you to be able to sift through all the information and media, anywhere in the world going back to the day we officially turn on Hidelight, but we’re still in development now so some content will be lost as we work towards our official launch. You can go back and look at content from years gone by, and discover endless information about anywhere in the world.

The goal of Highlight is to connect you with real people in your neighborhood. There’s a great power in creating something with others; with Highlight you can turn any content into a project, and connect content together with other contributions so that the creative potential of a Collaboration is greater than the sum of its parts.

We hope there are going to be people on Highlight whose content is very special to you, but you may not know that person in real life. Following somebody lets you track their creations. Being a friend with somebody is more intimate, like it is in real life. Friendship gives you a private channel to chat with your friends within the app, and you can set content so it’s only visible to your friends, and have more personal interactions with them.

The points in the app let you know where you stand in your community. They also act as a way for us to assess your reliability. As you gain more points you have more rights throughout the app. We don’t want people to join Highlight in order to troll, so the points help us root out bad actors. As a new user you will still be able to do all the things that older users can do, but the points act as training wheels until you’re really flying. Some people enjoy points, if you don’t please feel free to ignore them while they do their magic in the background of the app.

I would really like to see people get paid for what they create. While not all creations are going to be wonderful, but there are real artists and writers and other creatives out there who are going to add their work to Highlight. You can buy coins using your PayPal account, then show those creatives some love by dropping a tip in their jar. Hopefully our artists and information experts will be able to pay for their living expenses from the work they do entertaining and educating us. Unfortunately Apple charges us 30% of what you donate, so we have to take a commission from the artists that you’re supporting. By giving a little here and there we hope to keep this community ad free.

Adding your opinion about people’s content helps the app decide what people should see first. Something that gets more love is easier for people to find, less popular contributions fade into the background, although theyy never disappear.

‘My Recent’ is where you can see information about content that you recently engaged with, either through comments, adding you images or pressing the +&- buttons. This is where you can engage with the people that contributed the content and other people who are commenting and adding information to the contribution.

‘My creations’ is the area where all of your content is visible. This is the place to find and engage with people who are commenting and adding information to your contributions.

If you would like everyone to see your contribution please select public, only your Connections can see your contributions when choosing the Friends option. Private means only you can see what you contribute, which is a good way to see something before you’ve decided if you want to share it more widely.

Layers are important to help your work live in the same place as others; when lots of people are on the app they will help contributions play well together. Without layers we would quickly run out of space in popular locations. There can be many different contributions on one layer, and you can choose any name that you would like, or use one of the ones that the app provides which most closely represent your contribution.

When contributing, if you would like your work to be visible so everyone can see your contribution use the normal selection here, if you are trying to send a friend request use the create connection option.