Niantic bought a company that was crowdsourcing a 3D map of the world, and now it’s looking to leverage its network of gamers to help it create an AR platform that will outmaneuver Apple and Facebook’s parallel efforts.
Niantic’s Real World Platform is only in preview, while Apple, Facebook and Google have launched dozens of updates to their respective development platforms. At the same time, for all of the announcements these massive companies have had regarding these platforms, AR has yet to deliver a convincing real-world use case.
In light of Niantic’s recent acquisition, I hopped on a Zoom call with Head of Engineering Yuji Higaki, who joined the company a few months ago after more than nine years at Facebook. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: My main question is, how do you compete with Apple and Facebook? A few years ago a lot of startups sprung up trying to beat them to the punch in the augmented reality space, but it’s just so hard to build out these ecosystems. Now, there aren’t too many startups building AR platforms — most of them have died — and I’m curious what you think of that challenge.
Yuji Higaki: I had a direct hand working for one of them for a long time. There are definitely challenges in a new space. We’ve been talking about it for years, but AR is really in its infancy still. The whole idea of creating a platform like this is new and we don’t have a lot of the baggage and legacy here. This is the sole thing we’re focused on.
One thing that’s gonna be very important as we build out this 3D map of the world is to be able to constantly update it and refresh it. I think this is going to be one of the interesting challenges because the environment changes, the architecture changes and those details matter a lot more when you’re actually creating this living, 3D mesh of the world that actually needs to be accurate so that you can interact with it.
So I think the fact that we’ve built a set of products right now, if you’re familiar with Ingress and Pokémon GO. They each have a very engaged user base that love to actively contribute and curate. People really want to be part of this and they actually really want to be part of world-building, so I think I think that that will help too.
What other advantages do you have in building a platform like this while having Pokémon GO and these other games in your back pocket?
While we’re developing this AR tech, we have a bunch of games that are in development at the same time. I think that’s one of the best ways to actually figure out what works is to use it in your own first-party apps — so we have that going on our platform.
Our platform already is available to our internal teams — it’s not externally released right now. It’s definitely a strength that we have multiple use cases and multiple teams iterating on different ideas that could work in a game. I think — with any platform — you really need to have a strong first-party use case to make it successful. It’s very, very hard to build a platform without that.
So, kind of the same case as Unreal Engine versus Unity, where Epic Games would argue they make a better engine because they have to solve the problems that come from developing Fortnite. With Niantic, your existing games aren’t as dependent on augmented reality though, so where do you think that innovation will come from?
Well, we are actively trying to push new AR ideas internally. There’s a spectrum of titles that we’re working on. There are the ones that are already public that aren’t as dependent on AR, but we have people thinking about all different kinds of interesting scenarios where AR becomes a more important part of the experience. I think it’ll be really important for us to also think about developing and testing some of the real-world non-game scenarios, too.
With Niantic acquiring 6D this month, what was it about that team that made you feel like this was an essential get to build out the platform?
So I mean, one of our big projects that we’re working on is building this 3D map of the world and to find this company that was so aligned, not only our vision for the future, but with our core culture and values, I was impressed by that. They were really asking me about what our approach was to user privacy and how we’re going to create these maps and sort of keep privacy as a top value while we’re doing it.
I think most consumers have heard a lot about AR but there hasn’t been much demand at all. Are you concerned about that cutting off the pipeline of developers that would want to be on an early platform like the one you’re building?
I think we still need that killer use case that depends on AR being awesome. Hardware companies innovating on hardware that makes this kind of close-by AR work really well is great. I think it’s great for this industry and I think it’s better for all of us. But I don’t think we’re going to actually see the mass excitement until someone actually leads the way with an experience that’s really great. And that’s why we’re working on those internally. I think we’re well-equipped to create those experiences.
I think that the industry as a whole is still very early and I think we’ll see a lot of successes over time. My guess is in two or three years we won’t be talking about who had the first application, but who has innovated the most in that time frame, who has figured out how to make AR work for — of course — gaming, but also exercise and socializing and commerce.
I suppose in two or three years, you’re really just hoping that someone is talking about a killer AR app succeeding?
Yeah — it’s hard to predict the exact time frame — but I do think that we will see some use cases that really cause people to understand what the value of AR is. Also the hardware will get better, our models will get better and the experience should overall be much, much better.