By Dominique Wu (09/06/2025)
It’s been wonderful working with the Lureo team, and I’m especially grateful to Michael and Adele for bringing me to the team. When I first began experimenting with location-based AR back in 2018, it felt like I had stumbled upon a new kind of canvas. This canvas wasn’t stretched on a frame or glowing on a screen. It was the world itself. Every park bench, every mural, every city square suddenly became part of a living story.
Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens) once noted that storytelling is what separates humans from other animals and explains why we can create culture, grow, document, and cultivate knowledge to become the strongest species on the planet. Telling a good story, especially when it enables creators to craft engaging ones, is a powerful idea that can help bring untold stories to life in different places.
Most AR no-code tools today focus on instant fun and commercial interactions. You open the app, play, and enjoy. That has its magic, but what it often lacks is a deeper connection between time, space, and story. That’s where Lureo stands apart. It’s a no-code platform for spatial storytelling, and it has taught me something powerful: you don’t need to be a developer to anchor meaning in place.
Lesson 1: Location Is a Storyteller
I used to think of stories as something you carry in your head by listening to music, talking to people, reading a book, or seeing them on a screen such as a phone, desktop, or XR wearable device. But when you anchor digital layers to physical spaces, the place itself begins to tell the story. A neighborhood park is no longer just “a park”; it can whisper its history, host interactive art, or guide a treasure hunt for kids. Working with Lureo reminded me that location is not passive; it is a protagonist.
Lesson 2: No-Code Means More Voices
In the past, creating AR experiences required coding skills, advanced tools such as Unity and Unreal, and often a whole development team. With no-code, the barrier drops. Creative agencies, artists, designers and influencers, and even people who simply want to share their neighborhood’s hidden gems can build their own AR experiences. That simple timeline-based interface is a great idea because it means more stories from more perspectives, not only polished brand campaigns but also deeply human, community-driven experiences.
Lesson 3: Storytelling Lives Beyond Screens
We spend so much of our lives looking down at rectangular screens such as phones, tablets, and laptops. Location-based AR changes that. Instead of staring at a flat screen with 2D images, interfaces, and videos, you are drawn outward into the street, into your environment, where 3D objects connect you to your location and tell stories. For me, that shift is not just technical; it feels like a reclaiming of how stories were always meant to be shared: in places, with people, through presence.
Lesson 4: Simplicity Sparks Creativity
The streamlined drag, drop, anchor, and publish process of a no-code tool has provided unexpected creative freedom. By not worrying about code, I could focus on the emotional arc: What does the audience feel when they step into this space? Where should they walk? What do they discover when they look up? In AR, design is based in a time-space 4 dimension telling a story, and with Lureo, I could think like a storyteller rather than a technician.
Where I See This Going
Location-based AR is still young. Yet it already holds possibilities such as museums that turn into time machines, cultural landmarks that come alive with untold histories, concerts that ignite city blocks, and community events that leave digital echoes for others to follow. And because the tools are no-code, those visions aren’t limited to big studios; they are accessible to all of us.
We would like to thanks Dominique for her work and insights on the Lureo team, it was a pleasure.
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