John Hanke, founder and CEO of Niantic, spoke out against digital metaverses. He called them a “dystopian nightmare” and offered an alternative idea for the development of this concept. We are talking about endowing the real world with additional digital information using AR technologies.John Hanke, photo: TechCrunch
Hanke told about this in the Niantic blog.
He expressed concern about a future in which people escape from reality and become attached to virtual worlds, as if in the novel “The First player to get ready.”
In his opinion, this book, like the works of William Gibson, served as a warning about a gloomy dystopian future. And the concept of digital metaverses only brings it closer.
Niantic intends to use technology to prevent the development of such scenarios. We are talking about the use of augmented reality in order to unite people and motivate them to interact with the real world. “Technology needs to be used to improve the interaction between people, not to replace this experience,” Hanke believes.
At the same time, he does not call for the complete abandonment of progress. Instead, Niantic is trying to answer the question — how can technology make our lives better? “Can they give us a reason to call a friend, make plans with family, or even find new friends?” asks Hanke.
The founder of Niantic offers the idea of a “metaverse in the real world.” Here’s how this concept should work using the example of the company’s products:
- Hanke wants to give users an experience that unites the physical and digital worlds. This idea has already been partially implemented in projects such as Pokémon GO and Ingress;the main task is to synchronize hundreds of millions of people around the world and allow them to interact with virtual objects in reality;
- To do this, the company has developed the Niantic Lightship AR platform, on which hundreds of millions of people can simultaneously create and interact with virtual objects;
- Niantic calls this idea a “shared state”: people see the same digital elements in the real world and, if they change, notice them at the same time.
- As part of the development of this concept, the company is working on creating a fundamentally new map of the world, different from Google Maps.
It will allow you to “revive” the real world with the help of additional information and interactivity. “Imagine that this is a kind of GPS, but without satellites and with a much higher level of accuracy,” explains Hanke.
To interact with this card, Niantic is working with Qualcomm to create AR glasses. They will allow you to provide the surrounding world with additional information in real time and add interactive objects to it. Niantic is currently investing in R&D and has already made the first prototypes of the device, but the project itself is still at an early stage of development.
“By combining such a service and the real world, reality itself will be able to change and open up new opportunities. Pokemon will now be able to really walk among us,” Hanke notes.
The founder of Niantic is convinced that the main driver in the development of technology will be games. As examples from the past, he cites the Nintendo Gameboy, which became the first successful portable console, and games like Quake and World of Warcraft, which stimulated the development of the home Internet.
With AR, Hanke hopes to make the world around him more “magical and exciting.” According to him, in the future people will complement reality, and not try to escape from it.
“Mario, Transformers, the Marvel superhero universe, the world of Wakanda, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Blade Runner, Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, The Maltese Falcon — all these and an infinite number of other worlds will become additional channels of reality that you can turn on at any time”, — explains his idea to Hanke.
According to the founder of Niantic, AR technologies will be used not only for games. The company wants them to be used for education, entertainment and even the construction of real objects.
At the same time, Hanke notes that it is already important to take care of such things as user data privacy and assess the potential impact of AR on our society. According to him, the development of the idea of a metaverse in the real world will be the same breakthrough as the advent of personal computers, the Internet and mobile phones.