Niantic’s new game Peridot is part pet sim, part research project

polygon.com:

Niantic, the maker of Pokémon Go, recently invited me to its London offices to see its new mobile pet sim Peridot. I saw a presentation, tried the game — which is released on iOS and Android on May 9 — and got to hang out with some of the developers, including the computer scientist heading the small research team that’s building the machine learning tech behind Peridot’s potentially groundbreaking new augmented reality technology.

But no demo could better illustrate the potential of Peridot than a half-hour I spent with the game a few days later, when I was given a test version to try at home. I have two young kids (ages 4 and 6), who were immediately charmed to see the cute creature of Niantic’s invention, called a Peridot, hatch on my phone screen and run around my house. We petted it, fed it, threw a ball for it that appeared to bounce off the walls in my living room, and watched it run around and behind the furniture, only slightly erratically.

Checking the baby Dot’s desires, I saw that it wanted to eat a dandelion, which needs to be foraged from grassy areas. Our backyard is paved, but there’s grass across the street, it’s a pleasant spring evening, and there’s a little time to kill before bath time — let’s go! We set out and the kids squealed to see the Peridot running ahead of us down the driveway. They were impressed that the game could tell the difference between grass, foliage, and paving stones, so the creature could forage different items from each.

I noticed that my Peridot wanted to forage from a Habitat, which is what this game calls the map-based local points of interest shared by all Niantic’s AR games (in Pokémon Go, they’re called PokéStops). I saw this was only a short stroll away and I hadn’t