The company behind the famous game Pokemon Go took advantage on May 24 of the Lightship Summit, an event dedicated to augmented reality (AR), to present its new products. Niantic wants to create a social network to facilitate the connection between players and will improve the anchoring of its games in reality with the Lightship VPS development tool.
A social network to connect all Niantic games
The company just unveiled Campfire, a social networking app to help gamers Pokemon Go and Ingress, to connect with each other. This tool makes events from different Niantic games locatable on a single map. Players will be able to share their location, send messages and join communities.
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There are already groups of players with a strong presence on social networks like Discord and Reddit. Niantic CEO John Hanke wants to go get these “ communities of players that have already been created all over the world, with tens of thousands of enthusiastic explorers. The AR entertainment specialist explains that Campfire will be the equivalent of a ” main home page for its entire line of augmented reality apps and games.
The Campfire app connects all of Niantic’s games. Image: Niantic
Augmented reality more accurate than ever
Niantic intends to occupy a prominent place in the field of augmented reality and is increasing investments to create its “real world metaverse.” In April, the company acquired AR studio NZRX, staffed by former Google employees. The biggest acquisition in its history was that of 8th Wall in March 2022 to make AR accessible via web browser.
Niantic presents Lightship VPS as a “ a visual positioning system that allows developers to determine the position and orientation of their users and gives augmented reality content breathtaking centimeter precision. »
Concretely, this means that developers will be able to power AR games by scanning places with unparalleled precision. For example, they can scan a statue and the surrounding environment to integrate them into the Lightship VPS geolocation system. Virtual objects would be able to take into account the details of the place and embrace its contours without passing through. This system is inspired by Snapchat’s Local Lesens tool but offers more freedom to developers.
These two novelties give a more concrete form to the design of Niantic’s metaverse. Tech players each have their own vision, including Meta, which is turning more towards virtual reality to immerse users in an entirely virtual world. Niantic meanwhile wants the “real-world metaverse” made possible by AR. With the success of Pokemon Gothe company could convince consumers.