Pokémon Go creator opens AR platform to developers
The company, which is best known for developing the AR mobile games Ingress, Pokémon Go, and the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, says that it will now allow third-party developers to apply to gain access to its Real World AR platform.
“Because we are so excited about the opportunity in advanced AR, we want other people to be able to make use of the Niantic Real World Platform to build innovative experiences that connect the physical and the digital in ways that we haven’t yet imagined,” says Niantic co-founder and CEO John Hanke. “We will be selecting a handful of third-party developers to begin working with these tools later this year.”
In the blog post, the company also offered “a peek inside” its Real World Platform – the first time it has offered such a public update of its technology – which it says can be thought of as “an operating system that bridges the digital and the physical worlds.” It is currently focusing on two AR-related technology challenges in particular.
The first,”occlusion,” is the ability to hide virtual objects – such as a Pokémon character – behind real things.
“One of the key limitations of AR currently is that AR objects cannot interact meaningfully in a 3D space,” says Hanke. “Ideally, AR objects should be able to blend into our reality, seamlessly moving behind and around real world objects.”
To help with this, the company says it has just acquired London-based computer vision and machine learning company Matrix Mill, and has established its first London office. The new team in London is focusing its research on the problem, and using computer vision and deep learning to develop techniques to understand 3D space – enabling much more realistic AR interactions than are currently possible.
The second technology challenge is that of “shared reality” – that is, enabling high-performance shared AR experiences for multiple users. Here, latency is the main issue, says Hanke, as “it’s nearly impossible to create a shared reality experience if the timing isn’t perfect.”
As a result, the company has developed proprietary, low-latency AR networking techniques. which it says has yielded a unified, cross-platform solution that enables a shared AR experience with a single code base.
Developers wishing to sign up for access to the Niantic Real World Platform can do so at https://nianticlabs.com/developers.
Related articles:
Pokémon Go, MEMS illustrate ‘new exciting reality’
Magic Leap opens AR headset to developers
Apple ARKit 2 offers AR shared experiences, persistence
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