Oof, where to even start? So, Snap Inc. and Niantic Spatial — yeah, that Niantic of Pokémon Go fame — are basically teaming up. Imagine mashing up Snapchat and Spectacles AR stuff with Niantic’s mind-bending geospatial sorcery. They want city-scale positioning. I mean, like, you and your buddy seeing the same floating virtual parrot in Times Square. Wild, right?
Honestly, AR tech today kinda blows my mind. It figures out where you’re standing, what you’re looking at. And if you want this next-level shared reality, well, it’s like a duet where both need to know the same song. Or in plain talk: devices need to map the same territory. Niantic’s been trying to pull this off for ages, aiming for devices to know precisely where they are on Earth without the GPS going, “Oops, you’re in a lake.”
And Snap? They’re jumping on this VPS — Visual Positioning System — bandwagon. Released this flashy concept video showing city-wide AR shenanigans. Like, imagine you’re at the park and boom, virtual unicorn concert pops up. AR moments everyone can see and laugh or gasp at together.
They’re calling it a “strategic multi-year partnership.” Sounds fancy, right? Snap’s got some dough on the table for Niantic, which just screams, “This is serious business.”
The payoff? Snap gets access to big-deal positioning tech, and Niantic? They get data, oodles of it. User scans feeding into their system, sort of like, “Here, contribute a scan and unlock this whiz-bang lens.” It’s how they’re planning to keep up with all that map detail, which honestly sounds like a modern-day treasure hunt.
Niantic’s got a knack for this, always poking around for user data to feed their spatial beast. Remember when they wowed everyone with Ingress and then super-sized it with Pokémon Go? Now, they’ve ditched their gaming kids to focus on, you guessed it, VPS magic. Niantic Spatial is the new nameplate they’re proudly dusting off.
Snapchat, with its bajillion users, could catapult this whole venture sky-high. It’s like the starter pack they needed to build probably the most gigantic geospatial AR map you can imagine. And honestly, I’m just here for the chaos and a front-row seat to whatever AR pandemonium unfolds next.
