The company offered a first glimpse at the potential of its platform by revealing the winners of a developer contest it first announced last December. The contest’s winner was “Run to My Heart,” a game that encourages players to go on runs together, and save their non-exercising friends from being turned into potatoes. “We really couldn’t have made this game without the help of the Niantic real-world platform,” said game developer Jenny Xu.
To that end, Niantic also showed off advancements in its cross-platform AR technology Wednesday, detailing in videos how it has been able to improve on occlusion. In essence, this means that AR characters are now more realistically interacting with the world around them, which includes hiding behind corners and other objects.” in the coming months.
All these announcements may seem like a scattershot of improvements. Taken together, they do show that Niantic is aiming to build much more than just a handful of games. Instead, the company is effectively developing information layers anchored in the real world, which could one day power all kinds of applications for AR glasses and similar devices.