Why the company behind Pokemon GO will rule the augmented reality age of the internet.

Trick Van Dyke
Good Audience
Published in
6 min readAug 19, 2018

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Two years ago Niantic released Pokémon GO to a untapped, nostalgia-loving fan base garnering widespread media attention. To date it has been downloaded over 800 million times with 65 million monthly active users. As of July 9, 2018 Pokémon GO has generated 1.8 billion dollars in revenue.

As much of an overnight success as Pokémon GO appeared to be, the foundation was built in 2001 as a mapping service called Keyhole. It was a revolutionary product that accessed satellite data to allow users on a conventional computer (rather than just NASA employees) to zoom in and virtually visit locations across the planet. Google acquired Keyhole in 2004 which formed the basis of Google Maps. By 2010, Keyhole CEO John Hanke was running the mapping branch of Google. In 2010, Niantic was founded within Google with the goal of gamifying their mapping expertise. Their first two games, Field Trip and Ingress were released in 2012 utilizing both location based and augmented reality technology which acted as technological precursors to Pokémon GO.

In 2015, Niantic left the Google umbrella, received investments from Nintendo, Pokémon and Google to the tune of $35 million, and announced Pokémon GO. By 2017 with one year of Pokémon GO popularity another $200 million was raised and Harry Potter Wizards Unite was announced. By utilizing their existing software they are hoping to charm another idol fanbase to create another groundbreaking augmented reality experience. One of the reasons Niantic’s position is so interesting is that they have managed to massively monetize an established genre (free to play mobile gaming with in app purchases) while building the infrastructure for the next stage of the mobile internet.

John Hanke and his team aren’t stopping with one or two hit games. They are aimed at becoming the entire infrastructure for augmented reality by creating the Niantic Real World Platform. “We think of the Niantic Real World Platform as an operating system that bridges the digital and the physical worlds” John Hanke said in a blog post. At the moment the AR community is scattered. Facebook and Snapchat are giving their facial recognition software to developers for AR “selfie” filters. Companies like Eyejack and Artivive are allowing museums and art exhibitions to utilize AR to revitalize the experience of art in person. As the need for stable AR infrastructure grows over the next decade undoubtedly, Niantic will come out on top. With huge cashflow from Pokémon GO and backing from large investors, Niantic is positioned in such a way that they can invent the AR platform and become the tollbooth on top of it. The complexity of their platform is reflected in the acquisitions they made in the last year. Niantic has brought some niche experts onboard to help solve some of the major software problems facing mass adoption of an Augmented Reality platform.

Machine learning, Computer vision and Occlusion: Machine learning uses statistical techniques to give computers the ability to progressively improve performance on a specific task or “learn”. In other words, engineers test a computer’s ability to identify an object by showing it a number of pictures and telling the program if it guessed right or not. Each correct identification adds to the “knowledge” the program has about an object. As the program trains on more inputs the understanding gets more nuanced. Humans learn in the same way, but have the disadvantage of only one brain and one set of eyes. A computer program can train on multiple sets of inputs at once to learn faster. As a company gets more users and more computing power it can train it’s machine learning algorithms better, faster and more often. YouTube is at a point where it can recommend videos to you better than if you were to pick them yourself. If machine learning is a computer’s brain, then computer vision is a computer’s eyes. Computer vision deals with how computers gain understanding from an input. The cutting edge of computer vision is being able to identify objects in real time. Matrix Mill is a UK based startup of machine learning experts building the computer vision aspect of Niantic’s infrastructure. They are working on solving the problem of augmented reality elements being able to hide behind or occlude real world objects. In order to do that the camera needs to know how to recognize an object and know where it is in 3d space.

Multiple Users and Persistence of AR Elements: Remember when PlayStation 1 only had local multiplayer? Then PS2 had an external attachment to connect an Ethernet cable to the internet. Then PS3 had built-in networking capabilities. Now we have 100 people on a mobile game of Fortnite together. Escher Reality is creating the means for multiplayer games to have AR elements that not only persist over time (ie being able to stop a session and reopen it with the digital elements in the same real world space as before), but allow multiple users to see the same instance of an element.

Social Network Elements: As Escher Reality handles the AR capabilities of multiplayer, the team behind Evertoon will take care of the social networking aspects. The idea behind Evertoon was to let users create animated movies with avatars of actors, musicians or celebrities. As of the Niantic acqusition Evertoon has been shut down and their team’s role at Niantic is still under wraps, but the first step will likely will be to bring social interactions (hopefully a trading platform) to Pokémon GO.

Graphics and Animation: The graphics in a video game or AR experience are everything in keeping the fourth wall intact and keeping players engaged. Acquiring a game studio is a good way to bridge the gap between software engineers and 3d artists. Seismic Games has an executive team that worked with Pandemic Studios to produce Star Wars and Lord of the Rings games between 2002 and 2009. As Seismic Games they have developed a mobile game for Marvel, a VR experience for Blade Runner and a game for AndroidTV and FireTV that lets you play along with gameshows on your mobile. With roots in gaming since the ’90s Seismic Games will be able to provide animation and project management expertise to compliment the tech-company side of Niantic.

The remote control on your TV used to let you change from ESPN, to FOX to NBC. The smartphone now lets you change from Instagram to Youtube, to Twitter. I don’t have an answer for if the smartphone killing device will be made by Apple or Facebook or Google or Amazon, but I am confident that the structure between that hardware and our reality will be made by Niantic. They have already demonstrated that they can entertain millions of people daily. As products and services make our lives easier we will tend to live in an AR world more often. Other companies are creating apps to make your route through the grocery store more streamlined using AR. In the tech world however, being first doesn’t mean you will win. We saw Instagram “copy” Snapchat’s stories feature last year as an example. A feature isn’t intellectual property for a tech company and can be copied by whoever has the best engineers. If Niantic wanted to develop an AR shopping assistant they could do it tomorrow, but as of right now the smartphone isn’t seen as an AR device. But it is firmly rooted as a gaming device which lets Niantic access millions of users while building servers, software and teams of engineers to service the world’s augmented reality needs. When we are ready.

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