Niantic Releases Lightship Platform for AR Apps to All Developers – Tablets & Phones – News

Pokémon GO developer Niantic will make its Lightship platform for AR apps available to all developers on Monday. The Lightship AR Development Kit allows developers to develop their own augmented reality applications.

It Lightshipplatform contains according to Niantic various technologies that the company uses in its own AR apps, such as Pokémon GO and Pikmin Bloom. The AR devkit allows developers to leverage these technologies when developing apps for Android and iOS. Coachella, Softbank, Universal Pictures and Warner Music Group, among others, will use the platform.

The devkit initially offers three of Niantics AR features. Among other things, the toolkit makes realtime mapping possible. Smartphone sensors are used to create depth images of an environment. Niantic’s devkit can use regular cameras for this, but it can also use depth sensors such as the lidar sensors in certain iPhones and iPads.

The platform further includes various sharefeatures, which should allow multiplayer sessions with up to five players. AR objects in a multiplayer session are synchronized between the different participants via a p2p network stack. The AR devkit also makes ARunderstanding possible. This ensures that virtual objects interact with the real world in the right way.

The Lightship toolkit is largely free, although in some cases the associated multiplayer API must be paid for. The multiplayer features are free for the first six months of use, and will remain free for apps with fewer than 50,000 monthly active users. Developers with more than 50,000 users will have to pay for the multiplayer features after the first six months.

Niantic continues to work on Lightship, and expects to release an update in the future that will add a “visual positioning system” for AR glasses. The AR company will also invest $ 20 million in ‘companies working on the future of AR’. The company will hold a developer conference in May 2022 where it will share new future plans for Lightship.

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