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- Niantic, the creator of hit mobile games Pokémon Go and the forthcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, showed off its cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) technology at a press event this week.
- Niantic revealed the Real World Platform, a service that ought to make it easier for developers to integrate state-of-the-art AR into their very own apps.
- It also announced the acquisition of Matrix Mill, a small augmented-reality startup.
- The key takeaway: Beyond just making smash-hit games, Niantic desires to turn out to be a key provider of software and services for AR, which Apple and others imagine might be the following big thing.
Pokémon Go is having a moment — a recent report says the two-year-old game brought in $104 million within the month of May, up 174% from the identical period in 2017.
The same report says Pokémon Go is hitting the best player counts since 2016, the 12 months of its launch.
Now, Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go, is taking a victory lap of sorts, because it revealed more about its underlying technology and the following steps for the corporate at a press event at its San Francisco headquarters this week.
At the event, Niantic didn’t offer many updates on Pokémon Go, its upcoming Ingress 2, or the much-anticipated Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. However, Niantic CEO John Hanke did say that Pokémon Go has “tens of tens of millions” of players, and that there is loads of appetite for more augmented-reality apps and games prefer it.
“We think that is an immense opportunity that’s only just getting began,” Hanke said.
Niantic CEO John Hanke
Niantic
As such, Niantic — which spun out from Google in 2015 — is accelerating its ambitions around augmented reality, the extremely buzzy technology for projecting digital imagery over the true world. Companies including Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook imagine AR to be the following big thing in computing.
In a more practical sense, Niantic announced the acquisition of Matrix Mill, a small augmented-reality startup that spun out of University College London within the UK. Plus, it previewed the Niantic Real World Platform — a set of technologies for constructing augmented-reality apps that any developer can license and use in their very own software.
The Matrix Mill technology is pretty neat, and centers on the concept of occlusion. With most AR apps, including Pokémon Go, it’s hard to take care of the illusion that a virtual object is definitely there, because when someone or something steps in front of your phone’s camera, the virtual object remains to be there, hovering in space.
With Matrix Mill’s occlusion technology, though, a virtual Pikachu can actually hide behind bushes or dart behind pedestrians, presenting a rather more immersive world. It’s not perfect, however it hints at big things to come back. Check it out:
Niantic also gave us a taste of the Real World Platform, with the promise of more details to come back later this 12 months.
The Niantic Real World Platform represents the culmination of plenty of the corporate’s research into augmented reality, said company officials on the presentation. While recent iPhone models support Apple’s own ARkit technology, and Google’s Android has ARcore, Niantic says it’s layered on special sauce that makes it easier for developers to make the most of AR, while also adding recent features not offered by either major phone platform.
To that time, Niantic showed off Codename: Neon, a prototype of an augmented-reality game built on the Real World Platform which will or may not ever come out as a finished game.
Codename: Neon does a couple of things which might be unusual in most recent AR games: For starters, players on Android and iOS devices can play together. It also tracks your fellow players as they move around in the true world, with minimal lag — which is sweet, because Codename: Neon is essentially laser tag, adapted for augmented reality.
Check it out:
I got to play Codename: Neon with a cohort of my fellow journalists, and got here away impressed. As with the occlusion demo, it is not perfect, however it’s fast, fun, and just works, even with some players on iPhones and others on Android-powered Google Pixel 2 phones. It points to a promising future for AR games.
Niantic also showed off yet another prototype in the course of the event, called Codename: Tone Henge. This is a multiplayer puzzle game, supporting similar technology as Codename: Neon. This one has an added bonus of “masking” other players in a digital avatar, which is a neat effect.
Check it out:
Whether or not these demoes ever turn out to be full-fledged games stays to be seen. However, it’s clear that Niantic is investing heavily in becoming a serious player within the nascent augmented-reality industry — which could help the corporate, which spun out of Google in 2015, have a source of income beyond the fickle marketplace for smartphone games.
“As the sphere develops, the appliance of AR is beyond just entertainment,” said Niantic AR research lead Ross Finman.
Finman hints that the identical sorts of digital mapping of real-world spaces that permits you to catch a Pikachu within the park could in the future help a robot navigate your property without bumping into things. In other words, while the technology is best for games today, the sky is the limit for what it could do tomorrow.
On a final note, I can not stress enough that Niantic didn’t reveal any recent details on Harry Potter: Wizard Unite. However, playing Codename: Neon and seeing the video for Codename: Tone Henge, it’s hard to fight the sensation that we secretly, stealthily got a preview of a few of the technology and gameplay coming to the app.
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