Niantic Launches Location Service For AR. And A Social Media App For Games

For years, Niantic, the company behind Pokémon GO, has been collecting spatial data from public spaces in cities in many countries around the world.

This time, it's stepping up its game, by introducing a hyper-detailed mapping system the company created from more than 30,000 public locations, including densely-populated locations, like San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle.

The company hopes that with it, it can help with the creation of augmented reality apps, games, and others that incorporate next level audio-visual experiences in everyday life.

Niantic created the 3D map using more than a hundred million video snippets from Niantic players who opted into sharing their screens, as well as developers and surveyors.

With this data, Niantic's 3D map can help developers see exactly how their users move through the world and view their surroundings.

Initially, the platform Niantic called 'Lightship Virtual Positioning System' has been made available in beta to independent AR developers

Lightship Virtual Positioning System is essentially a virtual map of the Earth that allows game developers to anchor 3D graphics to places in the real world.

John Hanke, the CEO and founder of Niantic, believes that AR shall continue to be incorporated into everyday life in increasingly sophisticated ways.

For example, in the future, you might be able to see directions to your destination overlaid on the streets as you walk them, via smart glasses; or you could look at a building site and see its history and past architectural incarnations.

Developers can also add their own locations to the map to support their AR apps and experiences.

Developers can do this by projecting digital elements to appear within the real-world environment, which can be seen either through one’s phone or smart glasses.

For starters, developers can use Niantic's Lightship tool to create virtual animals that hide behind park benches; create signs for public statues; pop up mobile characters “painted on the ground showing the path to your destination.”

Hanke said that this is a key step towards "opening this science fiction reality we dream about. We can start putting virtual things into the world that are attached to the right parts of that physical world."

With its massive amount of data, Niantic created the tool so developers can create experiences outside the AR/VR ecosystems of Apple, Meta, and Google.

This may offer some advantages. Niantic, after all, has the most real experience in developing and fielding AR apps, including one that was a massive hit (Pokémon Go) and introduced many, many people to the concept of augmented reality in the first place.

"About once a decade for the last 70 years, a new computing platform arrives and changes the way we work, play, communicate with each other, and lead our lives,” said Hanke during his keynote. "We’re now at the beginning of another one of those shifts, and it could be the most consequential one yet. This transition will truly blend the real and the digital world."

The concept of real-world AR has become the centerpiece of Niantic’s take on the metaverse, but it’s far from the only platform in town. Google, under whose wing Niantic originally developed its technology, recently released its own AR map of the world, which it built using the terabytes of photos it has collected for its Google Street View function.

Niantic and its competitors in AR are creating such maps in preparation for a major shift in personal technology toward spatial computing.

“About once a decade for the last 70 years, a new computing platform arrives and changes the way we work, play, communicate with each other, and lead our lives,” Niantic founder John Nanke said of AR during his keynote Tuesday in San Francisco. “We’re now at the beginning of another one of those shifts, and it could be the most consequential one yet. This transition will truly blend the real and the digital world.”

One of the first projects created with this tool is made in a collaboration with the artist JR, called JR Reality.

JR is known for pasting giant photos of people in public places, and Niantic’s technology allows users to add their own JR-style portraits or voice messages to specific public locations, adding to those of everyone else who have made the same pilgrimage.

"Have you ever passed somebody on the street and wondered what their story is?” JR wrote in a statement.

“It’s time to go outside and explore, and reconnect with one another and show the world your face again. Together we can tell the world your story and meet the amazing people that live in your city."

Hanke himself is also excited to see how the map can also improve Niantic’s flagship product: Pokémon GO.

Pokémon Go was arguably the first successful commercial use of AR. It was downloaded more than 500 million times in its first year, with aspiring trainers hunting Pokémon all over the world.

Besides Lightship Virtual Positioning System, Niantic also announced its own metaverse called the 'Campfire'.

What it does, is allowing users to discover the AR games and apps Lightship developers create.

While it seems that Campfire resembles an app store, but things go beyond that, because Niantic has added a social element that allows users to also find friends to go on an AR adventure together in the real world.

This is because Campfire is map-based, in which it allows users to see other users in a local area. This allows them to message each other, share content and organize events.

In other words, Campfire is more or less, like Discord, in a way that it brings the social forum app to offer different features that all focus on a messaging app for massive discourse on a specific subject.

"Our big thesis is that the metaverse is something that happens out in the real world," Hanke said.

"We think of it as the homepage of the real-world metaverse," Hanke explained, "a place where players can discover other players in their local area, message one another and share content, organize their own events and meetups, and foster the kinds of real-world social connections that have always been at the core of what Niantic does."

While AR is definitely the future of human-computer interaction, Niantic is no stranger to privacy issues.

In the past, a number of instances have forbid people from playing Pokémon GO, fearing that Niantic can collect data from private and restricted areas.

Experts are already concerned about the onset of AR, and what the technology means for public surveillance.

Further reading: Pokémon GO Creator Launches Platform To Build ‘Real-World Metaverse' Apps