Niantic, the studio behind Pokémon GO, announced today that it has acquired augmented reality startup 6D.ai. As TechCrunch reports, this San Francisco-based startup had focused on creating technology that would allow smartphones to quickly detect 3D layouts.
It’s easy to see how Niantic can use the 6D.ai technology in its suite of mobile games, including Pokémon GO. Over the next month, Niantic will shut down 6D.ai’s existing developer tools and instead work to integrate the technology with the Niantic Real World Platform.
As TechCrunch emphasizes in its report, Niantic’s goals extend far beyond Pokémon GO. The company hopes to create a developer platform that other applications can use, much like similar efforts by Facebook and Apple’s ARKit framework — hence the implementation of 6D.ai technology into the Real World platform.
6D.ai had touted itself as a powerful way to create real 3D models of the world using smartphone cameras. The goal was to crowdsource data from users to create a three-dimensional model, as TechCrunch wrote in 2018:
This is a notable acquisition for Niantic, which so far has perhaps had the most commercial success with augmented reality. Apple is doubling down on its AR efforts, and recently introduced a new iPad Prow with a LiDAR Scanner and a new version of ARKit to take advantage of that hardware.
TechCrunch’s full story on the acquisition is well worth a read and can be found here.
