Produced | 93913 Media Center
Written by | Dafu a grain of millet
Edited | William
Recently, Niantic announced its latest AR mobile game "Peridot", which triggered a rush of media reports.
When launching Lightship, an AR game development platform that cooperated with Qualcomm to launch AR glasses prototype design and launched its own research and development, the outside world speculated that Niantic, with a valuation of up to $9 billion, would enter the development of AR glasses games. In fact, after that, except for some acquisitions, Niantic didn't do anything more.
However, with "Peridot", a mobile game that has not yet opened for testing, things have taken a turn for the better. Niantic, which has been quiet for half a year, has some heat again, and the Google index has also seen some fluctuations. What does the launch of Peridot mean for Niantic? Is it another step forward in the development of AR glasses games, or is it something else?
Peridot: Post-20s "Cyber Electronic Pet"
According to the promo, Peridot is a pet breeding game that continues Pokémon Go, but it is a completely different gameplay. In Pokémon Go, players need to collect and cultivate various Pokemon, while in Peridot, each player only needs to keep one pet, and it is understood that according to the personality of the pet parents and the player's parenting style, each Peridot will have a different personality. Some media have described Peridot as a "hybrid of Takuma Kaeko (たまごっち, an electronic pet toy) and Pokémon Go" (Pokémon Go).
In "Peridot", we were very surprised to see that the capabilities of AR technology were further demonstrated. Niantic said: "The game setting of Peridot requires identifying the environment and making it part of the game. Peridot is very intelligent, and it can identify different physical surfaces such as dirt, sand, water, grass and leaves. When your Peridot forages on one of the surfaces, it will get different kinds of food accordingly, such as kelp from water or prickly beets from sand. ”
According to some analysts, in the game promo, the use of AR to detect geometric objects was also seen, and real-time feedback on geometric objects was designed in the game, such as shadow occlusion and so on. Although this feature in the "Pokémon Go" promotional film was not realized, the AR scanning recognition capability based on the promotion of Niantic's official platform Lightship may not be true.
The price of Takuma Gezi in the market ranges from 300-5000 yuan, in addition to the blessing of the Sanrio joint name, it also proves from the side that the electronic pet is not obsolete, and there is still a huge demand in the market. "Peridot" puts electronic pets on mobile phones, combined with AR, giving the ability of new era technology, such as connecting with the real world, pet marriage and childbirth, etc., turning electronic pets into "cyber electronic pets", which is more in line with the tastes of contemporary users.
Focus on LBS, "Dead End" Pokémon, Niantic's mobile AR game
Above we gave a brief look at what kind of game Peridot is, but today's protagonist is not it, but 2 key messages from Niantic in the release of this game.
First, niantic, which has been digging deeper into "Pokémon", has finally regained the influence of "Pokémon".
According to Sensor Tower, Pokémon Go has made more than $3.6 billion in cumulative revenue by the end of its fourth anniversary, transforming Niantic from a newly independent 30-person startup to a large 800-person, $9 billion business. It can be said that Pokémon Go made Niantic.
In the past few years, Niantic has avoided the "Pokémon" IP and instead developed a new game for the Harry Potter IP. However, in terms of current earnings and various data, harry potter: wizarding union is not ideal, especially in the case of pokémon go. So Niantic decided to cut the project.
Niantic CEO John Hank said in an interview with The Verge that Harry Potter: Wizarding United has a low return on investment and is not worth continuing to invest resources and effort, and cutting the project is also a unanimous decision of the board. However, the extra resources will be used for other projects.
The so-called "other projects" are the "Peridot" we see. From the first map exploration application "Field Trip" to "Ingress" to "Pokémon Go", Niantic's game development has a unified feature - LBS, a location-based service, that is, with map and reality interaction as the core, and shows an increasingly accurate and gamified trend.
According to this trend, the development should be more focused on the precise game type, but "Harry Potter: Wizarding United" and "Pokémon Go" remain highly homogeneous, so even if this project uses the world's top IP, but the gameplay is not new, so the market feedback is not good, it is also expected to be cut.
Apparently, Niantic is also aware of this problem, so it launched a "Peridot" that still uses LBS, which seems to be a successful case of skin change "Pokémon Go", but in fact, the gameplay is more accurate and focused.
Second, Niantic intends to continue to produce new products on mobile PHONE AR, rather than doing AR glasses-based games as previously speculated.
John Hank mentioned two points in the interview: first, AR glasses will reach the ideal form in a year or two; second, in terms of AR glasses, Niantic's goal is to promote the application of AR in outdoor scenes.
These two views combined with "Peridot", first of all, there will be no AR glasses games in the short term, or mobile AR games like "Ingress" and "Peridot" will continue to be updated. Then continue to use these games to explore AR's capabilities in outdoor scenes, such as real-world physical surface recognition, three-dimensional object recognition, etc. shown in "Peridot" or even the Lightship platform, in order to achieve a better virtual + real experience.
Niantic Future: Left-handed phone AR, right-handed glasses AR
After half a day of talking about "Peridot", "Pokémon Go", "Ingress", all mobile AR. Could it be that Niantic's Lightship AR glasses application development platform, which was not released for a long time, was also abandoned? Of course not, John Hank mentioned Lightship several times in an interview with The Verge.
"Real-time map mapping is a key part of Lightship... It also helps AR understand its surroundings... Lightship can analyze semantic information based on 3D scene data, and create vivid and intelligent AR based on the elements in the scene. In addition, Lightship can also help develop multiplayer AR scenes, supporting multiple players to share AR content synchronously. The head of development at Lightship also believes that it provides the ability required by AR to understand the world, and AR glasses will replace mobile phones in the next two or three years.
This is also the focus of what we want to say, in fact, Niantic did not give up the development of AR glasses games, but became a "two-pronged approach", that is, in the AR glasses and mobile PHONE AR track together, John Hank said: "Technically, Niantic continues to improve the Earth-level 3D map, bringing more diverse AR application scenarios." In 2022, Niantic expects developers to start using 3D map data to set up persistent LBS AR content around the world, or to improve the quality of life of users through AR and make everyday experiences more interesting. ”