Snap Inc. and Niantic’s New Partnership: A Major Leap for City-scale AR Positioning and Experiences

Okay, so here’s what I’ve got. Bear with me, it’s a bit of a ride.

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So, I heard that Snapchat – yeah, the app where you send pics that disappear faster than my motivation on a Monday morning – has teamed up with this company called Niantic Spatial. Apparently, they’re rolling out some super-futuristic geospatial tech. Honestly, when I first heard “geospatial,” I thought it was just fancy talk for maps. But no, it’s like these crazy smart city-scale maps for AR stuff.

Snapchat, with those quirky Spectacles AR glasses, and Niantic are like that weird couple you didn’t see coming. They’re out to take over the world, or at least the AR world. Niantic wants these AR devices to not just know where they are, but dance in sync like they’re in a techie flash mob. Imagine wandering around town and your AR glasses know you’re on Main Street and not Elm. Wild, right?

Niantic’s been on this thing for years. They’re trying to get devices to share a big, virtual map, so everyone sees the same, uh, thing – like magic but with more coding? GPS isn’t cut out for this gig (surprise!). So, anyway, these devices get all buddy-buddy, syncing your AR Pokémon battle or whatever it is the youths do these days.

So Snap and Niantic dropped this video – which I haven’t seen, to be honest, but the gist is: imagine strollin’ through the city and your glasses decide it’s concert time. Like, you’re near that one park bench and BOOM, it’s like a rock show but virtual. Coordination at its most chaotic, I’d say.

They made some kind of big announcement about this partnership – something about Snap throwing money at Niantic. Strategic is the word they used, and I mean, when is it not? Snap gets tech that maps your local coffee shop down to the sugar packets, and Niantic gets all the juicy user data to keep their maps fresher than a late-night burrito.

What’s Niantic doing with all this scan data from Snap? They’re on a mission, I guess, to chart the whole world – one scan at a time. Snapchat users could be out there, unknowingly immortalizing their favorite taco stand as part of this ever-growing, epic AR map. I mean, would you scan your burrito for science? Apparently, people do.

Niantic’s been into this crowd-sourced mapping game since before it was cool, with stuff like Ingress and Pokémon Go, which – fun fact alert – were all about getting people outside, running amok, and probably tripping over their own feet while catching imaginary monsters. Now, they’re done with games but still into maps. Irony?

Snap’s Spectacles haven’t exactly broken records – unless there’s a record for “AR glasses mostly used as headbands.” But hey, Snapchat’s got millions of users. Imagine if just a fraction of them start scanning their daily donut runs. Before you know it, Snap and Niantic might just own the geospatial AR world or something.

So, what’s the takeaway? I’m not sure, maybe just that our tech-driven future is speeding along faster than I can understand it, and maybe that’s okay. Or not. Who knows.