A system provides an augmented reality (AR) experience in a parallel-reality application in which a geography of a virtual world parallels a geography of the real world. The system receives a connection request from a client device and receives a route that the client device traversed in the real world. The route comprises a plurality of locations in the real world. The system determines a plurality of virtual locations to place virtual elements at, where each virtual element corresponds to a location in the real world of the route. The system updates a global state of the AR experience to include the plurality of virtual elements at the plurality of virtual locations. The system provides, to a second client device, AR data including some of the virtual locations for display of some of the virtual elements at the corresponding locations in the real world.