Building a mirror world – the team at plaYce.A high-speed car chase through the streets of London. A treasure hunt with friends in the Ivory Coast. A baseball tournament game at Yankees Stadium starring your favorite pitcher. Thanks to recent satellite technology used for GPS, interactive city maps and applications like Google Earth, every inch of our planet has been mapped. So why not play on it?

This is the vision of plaYce, an Israeli-American company creating a virtual world of thrilling game play by linking every coordinate of our planet to a pixel of its game world. This means gamers who come to plaYce’s website can compete, shoot, spar, knuckle punch, karate chop, race hotrods — and do whatever gamers and their avatars need to do — set on a backdrop that uncannily mimics reality.

“We are building a mirror world,” Carmel Gerber, plaYce’s VP of business development and co-founder tells ISRAEL21c.

Requiring no downloads or special software — and played for free — plaYce wants people to be able to send links to a game and allow friends to jump into a hot interactive 3D experience that either connects them to places they already know, or ones yet to be discovered.

From destination site to game development

It not only gives gamers a destination site for a number of multiplayer games to enjoy, plaYce is also a platform for game developers, saving them anywhere from 15 to 70 percent of development costs, says Gerber: “plaYce is providing partners with the infrastructure for developing their games, like the streets of the city,” Gerber says.

On this platform, game developers design their characters and storyline. plaYce, which intends to launch its beta site in the next couple of months, plans to help game development partners quickly launch these new games and host them, while giving an opportunity — one that most only dream about — of making money from their games.

Like garage bands trying to break out with a hit pop song, many young game developers hope to create the next big game. plaYce aims to be the destination where dreams are made into reality, allowing game creators to make money through special promotions such as virtual goods: accessories for one’s avatar, or special weapons with magical powers. Advertising billboards and product placements throughout the game is another revenue stream built into the company’s business model.

plaYce employs seven people and is headquartered in San Francisco, with an R&D office in Kfar Truman, Israel. The company has no plans of developing its own games. “We want access to other designer’s creativity,” says Carmel.