Pokémon Go creator Niantic to speed up development of ‘OS for ar’

Niantic Labs, the company behind Pokémon Go, will accelerate the development of its ‘augmented reality engine’ Real World Platform. This requires a lot of employees. With Real World Platform, Niantic wants to build an operating system for augmented reality.

For hiring those people, Niantic has received an investment of 245 million dollars, the company reports. It is unknown how much faster Niantic wants the Real World Platform finished. It is a major project, with which Niantic wants to create software that other developers can use to create apps and games for augmented reality.

This software must, among other things, be able to quickly classify and recognize objects, so that they can be incorporated into the gameplay. Officially, Pokémon Go also supports augmented reality, but many players disable seeing the Pokémon in the camera view, because the Pokémon do nothing with the environment and it does not add anything to the gameplay.

Niantic is also developing Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, a Harry Potter-themed variant of Pokémon Go in Ingress. That game should have been released last year, but the release has been delayed until this year.