“Viewing the world differently”- this is what Niantic is building for. The company is known for its successful augmented reality games such as Ingress, Pokémon Go, and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Being established in 2010, Niantic has always focused on technology that paves the way for new entertainment experiences, advanced robotics, and scaled adaptive computing. But Niantic’s plans are facing hard times because of an idea, that of the metaverse, that was first mentioned way before the establishment of the company.
The term “metaverse” came for the first time in the 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. Metaverse is living a life in a virtual space where every detail of our physical world life is covered. There are emotions, ambitions, fights, love, and anything one can think of. Though the technology sounds promising, if it becomes our reality, it would destroy us by forcing us to live an algorithmic life set by the big companies.
Niantic sees this as the rise of the dystopian nightmare. General human behavior has some characteristics such as standing up, walk outside and connect with people and the world around us. But the self-destructing technology we’re about to accept will wipe away all these from our lives. So, Niantic is working relentlessly to create a world where the use of technology will not take our behavior away but rather, it will only make our lives better.
Niantic and its vision of the metaverse
As mentioned earlier, “viewing the world differently” is what Niantic is built for. The company is continuing to collaborate with other companies and organizations that have the same vision as Niantic has. “We’ll be focusing on how to bring our augmented reality tools to everyone and every developer”, Niantic said. “Our work represents the culmination of decades of obsessing about geospatial technology, real-world gaming, and planet-scale augmented reality. We’ve been mapping reality for years, so we can augment it for the years to come”, they added.
Technology should be used to make the core human experiences better, not to replace them. Niantic is trying to create such technology that will bring us out of the home to meet new people, to discover new places, to feel the beauty that lies outside of our homes.
How Niantic incorporated its vision within the existing titles
Niantic merges the physical world and the virtual world to create something that stands out from the others. Their different views of the outside world brought some amazing results. Pokémon Go, one of the best creations from Niantic, Inc., was launched in 2015 and became an overnight worldwide phenomenon. Users had downloaded Pokémon Go over 650 million times by the year 2017. Pokémon Go players collectively walked about 15.8 billion kilometers.
By creating augmented reality games, Niantic already dealt some impactful damage to others that are trying to lead us to the post-apocalyptic dystopia via metaverse. The idea for their visions for software and content is named “reality channel”. Here, virtual reality will be laid over the real world. Games and entertainment are the key drivers to engage more people. More activities other than these will come shortly.
Plans with the“Lightship” platform
The company developed “Niantic Lightship’s Augmented Reality Developer Kit (ARDK)” to create engaging AR experiences that inspire movement, exploration, and connection globally. To bring virtual content to the real world, Lightship is a client platform where the standard for AR, mapping, social, and security is set.
Lightship, formerly known as Niantic Real World Platform, is where people can experience AR in a group of millions or more. Currently, the multiplayer mode supports a limited number of eight people.
The starting point to transform games is to bring people outside. New thoughts and ideas are welcomed at Niantic, and they want third-party developers to develop new experiences for the people.
Final thoughts
Though the plans are limited as technology is not that developed yet, but the hope always remains. To keep a safe environment in the physical world, merging AR with reality is one of the best ways to stop letting others from entering our personal and behavioural life. Games are a part of the plan of Niantic to make people more engaged. Now the only thing to watch is how people and developers react to the changes that Niantic is trying to bring.
What are your thoughts on Niantic and its idea of a better metaverse? Let us know in the comments below!
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