AR technology company Niantic, most popular for Pokémon GO, reported today that it will launch Lightship, an AR Developer Kit (ARDK) that will make building increased reality experiences more available. This free, transparently accessible technology will help Niantic establish the foundation for its vision of “real-world metaverse.”
As per Hanke, Lightship will let mobile apps recognize whether a client’s camera is pointed at the sky or water, map the surfaces and depth of a environment progressively, or place a virtual object behind an physical one.
Niantic is most popular for making quite possibly the best mobile games ever, Pokémon Go. With Lightship, Hanke says the company is “opening the vault of tech that we’ve been using to build our products” to help others build “planet-scale AR apps.”
Lightship has been in development for a long while. In any case, beginning Monday, it’s open for any developer to get to. The majority of the software toolkit is free, however Niantic will charge for an feature that can allow numerous devices to get to shared AR encounters at the same time. The organization is likewise submitting $20 million to support new organizations building AR applications.
Niantic is now arranging a significant update to Lightship for the following year, building what Hanke calls a “visual situating framework” for AR glasses.
By utilizing the new system, glasses with shows in them will actually want to see precisely where they are in reality, which will let virtual objects (like a Pikachu) stay moored determinedly to real-world locations. It’s a basic part expected to make AR glasses, for example, the sort that Niantic is working with Qualcomm, helpful.
Hanke, who recently ran Google Maps prior to beginning Niantic, says the objective with Lightship is to “fundamentally set an example for what AR can be.” While tech goliaths like Meta and Apple are building comparative programming apparatuses, he believes Lightship’s help for iOS and Android will make it an appealing proposing to developers.
“The state of the world today is sort of 50/50 between Android and iOS,” he says. “And I think it’s going to be much more diversified in the world of AR glasses. So a solution that actually solves the developer problem of being able to write something and create something that’s going to work across multiple platforms is really important.”
In August, Hanke composed a blog entry calling the possibility of the metaverse a “dystopian nightmare.” He’s against the possibility of technology pulling individuals out of this present reality. Not at all like the VR metaverse advocated by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he needs Niantic and Lightship designers building AR applications that keep individuals drew in with the physical.
“There’s a fork in the road,” he says. “One path goes in this direction of apps that are not connected to the world around us and not helping us connect with the people who we are around.” The other path Niantic is taking with Lightship, according to Hanke, is “encouraging people to do things together with other folks who are alive.”