If you don’t know who Niantic are, you may know the mobile game which they own, a little something called “Pokemon Go”, it brought not only mobile augmented reality to the world way before its time but also went on to be one of the top grossing mobile games of all time.
Therefore, the announcement today that they are working on an AR metaverse is important, and important for the geospatial industry at that. On the Lightship platform roadmap, Niantic have outlined that they will be releasing minor updates every six weeks and major updates every six months, the prime item on that list being The Visual Positioning System (VPS).
Niantic go on to say that the VPS is planned to be centimeter accurate and has six degrees of freedom (in selected cities) so that augmented items can be placed accurately in the real world. Furthermore, the roadmap has recognition of semantic environment types, this allows for AR interaction based on the type of real world item and lastly, contextual object placement allowing for automatically placing objects in relevant real world locations.
The VPS is an exciting prospect for the geospatial world as an authentic AR experience relies on accurate placement of the objects, the VPS offers the equivalent of GCPs, Ground Control Points so that the information can be georeferenced within the real world. If Niantic succeed and create a metaverse with accurate VPS it could change how we use mapping through overlaying information in the real world.
The lightship platform is already available as an ARSDK, Augmented Reality Software Development Kit for Android, iOS, and Unity, meaning that right now it is possible to take those 3D maps you’ve made, bring them into Unity and get started.
