Niantic moves beyond games with Lightship AR platform and a social network

theverge.com:

Niantic made a name for itself in the mobile gaming industry through the enduring success of Pokémon Go. Now the company is hoping to become something else: a platform for other developers to build location-aware AR apps on top of.

This plan has been in the works since at least 2018, but it’s taking a big leap forward this week with the long-awaited release of Niantic’s location mapping software for AR, which it calls the Visual Positioning System, or VPS in a nod to GPS. The technology makes it so that AR experiences can be grounded to a physical location, like the front of a building or a park monument, rather than just floating aimlessly through a phone’s camera view.

Developers can now use VPS as the tentpole feature of Niantic’s broader Lightship SDK, which also lets multiple devices access a shared AR experience — like a 3D multiplayer game — at the same time. VPS will be free during an initial public beta period and then switch later this year to a tiered billing system that’s based on an app’s number of monthly users, according to Niantic spokesman Jonny Thaw.

In addition to VPS, Niantic is this week also releasing Campfire, a location-based social network that integrates with its games and future apps that use Lightship. Campfire taps your Niantic account’s list of friends to show their locations on a map if they opt in, along with nearby in-game experiences. You can organize and RSVP to real-life meetups for these experiences, such as a Pokémon raid, and chat with other players in a group. The goal is for Campfire to not only make Niantic’s games more social but provide a way for other developers to have their Lightship-powered apps be discovered by the company’s millions of users.

To power VPS, Niantic has