John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, the well-known company behind the hit mobile games Ingress, Pokémon Go, Harry Potter Wizards Unite, and the already announced upcoming arrivals of Catan World Explorers and Pikmin, has just released what appears to be a wearable augmented reality device, built around ordinary glasses, on which the company’s logo clearly stands out.
Niantic CEO showed their AR goggles
Still far from April 4, for the moment there is no reason to take this little teaser as a joke. And is that although some time ago Niantic was denying the fact that they were developing their own AR hardware, the company has been “fooling around” for quite some time now with the possibility of adapting their games to augmented reality.
In fact, in late 2019, the company took the stage with Qualcomm to discuss plans for an augmented reality headset using the chipset maker’s Snapdragon XR2 platform, something they claimed would bring their Niantic Real World Platform ecosystem to third-party AR devices.
Exciting to see the progress we’re making to enable new kinds of devices that leverage our platform… pic.twitter.com/yYglk4q89G
— John Hanke (@johnhanke) March 29, 2021
The image it shows looks like a small fragment of digital AR glasses, with slightly darkened lenses, and plastic temples on which rests what appears to be a fabric strap (whose use remains to be seen) and under which stands out the presence of small perforations, possibly intended for the inclusion of a speaker and/or microphone.
All this is accompanied by a quite clear message from Hanke himself: “It is exciting to see the progress we are making to enable new types of devices that take advantage of our platform”. And is that no doubt this could be a great solution to avoid the numerous problems that have had some users by “fault” of these games, moving through the streets with his eyes down and focused on their smartphones.
