Niantic, 5G and world domination

While the coronavirus is spreading across the planet, Niantic is quietly running ambitious plans to turn the world into an AR platform.

It all started about a year ago, when the company attended unexpectedly at an 5G-related event maintained by Qualcomm. Well. Let's explain - who is who, and why 5G is matter.

Nowaday, Qualcomm is one of the largest SoC manufacturers for smartphones. Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets are the "standard de-facto" for Android devices. Released this year, the 865+, 865, 768, 765 and 690 chipsets are designed to provide the foundation for spreading 5G across consumer devices.

In turn, 5G is expected to become a "wireless backbone" for cloud-centric entertainment, reducing latency from tens of milliseconds to even fractions of milliseconds, which is critical in cloud gaming applications. And this, accordingly, should accelerate market players like Playkey, GeForceNow, and Stadia. The goal is simple - having a 5G-compatible device, the user can play any content without thinking about system requirements.

It would seem - what does Niantic, a company developing games with "augmented reality" have to do with it? In fact - very much. If we assuming "augmented reality" as 3D real-time content, these are very heavy and demanding applications in terms of latency, bandwidth, and computing power. And Niantic is keeping in mind for moving application logic from a user device to a server. So, this is uncomfortable bit without fast and responsive communication.

This approach makes possible to greatly offload end-user devices and reduce their cost, making VR and AR content available to billion people, not only to the owners of top-grade smartphones.

Let's remember projects like Google Glass and Oculus. Glass was the first attempt to bringing AR to the user experience, but it was ahead of its time. And it's impossible to fit a powerful chip - which will capable to process video from the cameras in real time and overlay AR artifacts - into the shackle of glasses. Also it would need backpack of a batteries, huh.

And here 5G is designed to combine low latency with the transfer of computational tasks to the data center of an AR content provider: cameras streams over 5G to a server that processes AR tasks, and the application receives back a rendered AR image.

Qualcomm is currently working on its own 5G AR platform, XR2, and Niantic is interested to be the exclusive AR content provider.

Today Niantic is going to enlist the support of telecom operators, who pending to deploy 5G networks - obviously, this will become users of these operators to get advantages in access to Niantic's AR content, and the Niantic itself could get Real World Platform at scale as close to "production-grade". By the way, the requirement for high-quality 3D content explains the introduction of a new "portal scan" activity in Ingress Prime, which is necessary to obtain an object's point cloud.

Deutsche Telekom, EE, Globe, Orange, SK Telecom, SoftBank, Telus, and Verizon were the first to cooperate, but Niantic is not going to stop there.

[source]