THE METAVERSE IS ALREADY HERE — AND IT’S FULL OF POKEMON, SAYS NIANTIC CEO JOHN HANKE
/John Hanke is the CEO of Niantic, a company that makes the wildly popular Pokémon Go mobile game in partnership with Nintendo and the Pokémon Company, but John actually started it as a skunkworks project when he was a Google Maps executive and spun it out.
Pokémon Go and its predecessor Ingress are now the largest and most successful augmented reality games in the industry, which means John has long been at the forefront of what we’ve all started calling the metaverse: digital worlds that interact with the real world.
Lots of companies are chasing metaverse hype. Mark Zuckerberg just renamed all of Facebook “Meta” to underline his shift in focus, and we just had Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth on Decoder to talk about it — but John’s been at it for a while, and I wanted to talk about the reality instead of the hype: is the technology for all this ready? What are the innovations that need to happen to enable some of these dreams? And how do you solve the problem of people walking around in headsets, experiencing wildly different realities from one another?