Niantic is working with Qualcomm on augmented reality glasses

guest · Dec 5, 2019

Niantic is working with Qualcomm on augmented reality glasses
December 5, 2019
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/05/niantic-is-working-with-qualcomm-on-augmented-reality-glasses/

We’ve known for a while that Pokémon GO creator Niantic feels a bit limited in what it can do with augmented reality today.

Between the latency limitations of 4G cellular networks and the need for players to wave a smartphone around to do anything in AR, the tech just isn’t where Niantic wants it to be. As I wrote in a profile of Niantic back in April, the company has been focusing a ton of its efforts on what’s possible as things like 5G and AR glasses become more readily available. Niantic CEO John Hanke is betting on AR glasses being the thing after smartphones.

It makes sense, then, that Niantic is working with Qualcomm to build 5G-ready AR glasses.
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Early this morning, Qualcomm announced XR2, a new chipset platform built specifically to power augmented reality and virtual reality devices.
Shortly thereafter, Niantic CTO Phil Keslin took the stage to announce that they’ve joined Qualcomm in a “multi-year collaboration” on this project.

Moving forward, though, it means that Niantic will be working with Qualcomm to flesh out the reference hardware for augmented reality glasses, helping them figure out exactly what it needs to do.
Meanwhile, Niantic will be tuning its Real World Platform (the architecture that powers all of its existing games, and which they’re slowly opening up to third parties) to make it play friendly with XR2.
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guest · Sep 1, 2020

‘Pokémon Go’ maker Niantic wants to turn AR into 5G’s first killer app
September 1, 2020
https://www.fastcompany.com/9054566...antic-wants-to-jumpstart-5g-augmented-reality

Niantic, the maker of the hit augmented reality game Pokémon Go, today announced it’s teaming up with a group of 5G carriers from across North America, Europe, and Asia to help high-quality AR experiences proliferate to millions of new users, as 5G technology capable of handling rich AR is deployed on wireless networks around the world.

As part of what it’s calling the Planet-Scale AR Alliance, Niantic will provide the carriers with a set of AR applications. The initial alliance partners—Deutsche Telekom, EE, Globe, Orange, SK Telecton, Softbank, TELUS, and Verizon—will be able to offer the experiences in their retail stores or for download to 5G-enabled handsets later this year.

“Integrating the [5G] networks of the carriers and the edge computing portion of that into our global platform so that we can deploy these things at scale to millions and millions of users.”
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SOFTWARE NOW, HARDWARE LATER
While the alliance is largely geared toward expanding AR software offerings on members’ networks, it’s also likely it will eventually impact hardware.

Last year, Niantic inked a partnership with Qualcomm to create a reference design for augmented reality glasses.
After all, he says, the mission of the Qualcomm reference design project is to help bring AR hardware to market, which by design would mean Niantic working hand in hand with hardware partners.
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The tech giants, especially Apple, are buying immersive technology companies left and right and trying to build the kind of broad, global, live 3D platform that Niantic has already hosted millions of people in.
For now, though, Niantic is happy just to help more people understand the power of AR, and it’s counting on its new alliance to make that happen.

For AR to be a driver of meaningful adoption of 5G networks, the carriers know that they need to offer more than entertainment.
They need to offer information, ways to navigate the real world, and metacontent, says Rubin.
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Niantic Planet-Scale AR Alliance

At Niantic, we’re building a planet-scale augmented reality (AR) platform to enable experiences across current and future generations of AR hardware that will give people entirely new ways to interact with the world.
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