The story so far
The game drove the technology.
We began in 2018 as a spatial gaming and technology company — built to make real places playable. Teaching machines to understand those places was the problem from the start, and over six years it made us a physical AI company — because the work demanded it. Every entry below is the same loop, one year further in.
- 2018
Helsinki.
Reality Crisis is founded — a spatial gaming and technology company, built to make real places playable. Teaching those places to understand themselves was the problem from day one; it just didn't have a category name yet.
- 2019
The language arrives.
Rodney Mullen joins at the very beginning — co-founder and investor, and the person whose insight anchors everything after: skateboarding is a physics-constrained language. A year earlier, IBM Research had run his trick grammar inside Watson — work he co-authored.
- 2019–2020
First build.
The first mobile AR Skatrix: heavy computer-vision and ML research, and a validated loop — scan, skate, share.
- 2021–2022
Soft launch.
200,000+ players on the App Store and Play Store, and feeds full of player clips nobody asked them to make. The work started conversations with the platform makers themselves — Apple reached out; Niantic took notice.
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The years between the receipts.
None of it went in a straight line. Bets were placed on platforms before their audiences arrived; builds were thrown away; the game outgrew three versions of its own technology. What survived every rewrite was the understanding — which is why the understanding is the product. Skaters know this loop in their bones: try, slam, adjust, land — and every landing becomes the floor for the next try. Skateboarding isn't this timeline's theme. It's its method.
- 2024
The hardest stage.
Skatrix Pro ships as a day-one Apple Vision Pro launch title. The same year, Niantic Spatial and Reality Crisis announce a publishing and technology partnership.
- 2025
The award, and the client.
The AUREA Award (Interaction, 2025). And commissioned work for Meta — mixed-reality work whose details stay with Meta.
- 2026
The tools step forward.
The Gen-XR R&D project closes with an unforeseen outcome, in Business Finland's own words: brAIn, the story engine, born inside the work.
- Next
The next generation.
The next generation of Skatrix is in development. brAIn is becoming the platform our own productions already run on. The rest gets built the way everything here was: one landed trick at a time.
The backing
Who's behind the work.
Behind the company stand Rodney Mullen, the European Union, the European Media and Immersion Lab, and Business Finland — alongside a diverse group of Finnish and U.S. investors: gaming veterans, award-winning artists, biotech innovators, and open-source pioneers. What unites them isn't a sector; it's a conviction about immersive technology, skateboarding, and the culture it comes from.
For a private conversation, email the founder directly: kasimir.lehto@realitycrisis.io · Press →
Where this connects