Forget Discord, Niantic has its own messaging solution for Pokémon Go players: a social AR app simply called Campfire. It will let you organize events, discover new locations and share content with other Pokemon players. It is like a local social network built entirely for AR. Niantic says, it’s “the ‘homepage’ of the real-world Metaverse,”. In fact, Campfire is already live in Ingress, the company’s first AR game, and it will be headed to all of its titles this summer. It makes sense to have a solution across the board.
Pokémon Go players normally use Discord and other platforms to communicate. And you might expect that it likely would have been difficult for Niantic to build social features directly into the game though. It does make more sense to release a separate app that can tie into all of the company’s experiences actually.
Niantic also unveiled Lightship VPS (virtual positioning system), a new platform that will let developers more accurately learn the position and orientation of the users. They will also be able to anchor AR content in place with “centimeter-level” precision, apparently. This will help devs produce better localization and persistence, which are the most important factors in an AR experience. To power this, the company has produced 3D maps in over 30,000 locations across six cities. San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, London and Tokyo. Exciting things are happening.
Source Engadget
Image Credit Niantic