Niantic’s CEO believes the metaverse could be a ‘dystopian nightmare’
/The metaverse, the concept of an alternative, shared digital world that originated in sci-fi, has bubbled up to the surface of tech chatter during the later days of the pandemic. It’s a concept that a number of Big Tech and gaming companies, most notably Facebook, Roblox, and Epic Games, are trying to make real.
One of the technologies that may be used to interact with a future metaverse is augmented reality, which intermingles digital content with the real world through a smartphone screen right now and AR glasses in the future. Niantic created the game that introduced many people to AR, Pokémon Go, which means that the company has a vested stake in its own version of a digital reality. Niantic said Tuesday it had acquired a 3D scanning app called Scaniverse, which it will use to crowdsource images from the smartphone cameras of game players. Those images will form a map that will allow Niantic to anchor digital objects to real-world places.