It is amazing to get out of your house. What if you could make your city walk more enjoyable by meeting historical figures who used to stroll those streets back when they were cobblestoned. What if you saw extinct species or imagined species in your city? John Hanke wants to see such things happen. He has sent millions of people out on outdoor adventures to capture cartoon characters.
Hanke is the founder and CEO of Niantic Labs. He launched Pokemon Go in 2016 and remains passionate about the vision of an augmented world, which is now known as augmented reality. Since at least 2010, he has pursued this vision. He founded Niantic in 2010 as an internal Google startup, and then spun it off to launch Go. Players walked the streets holding their phones to their faces, trying to capture Weedles and Squirtles. The game was a cultural success and a financial success. It earned over a billion dollars in revenues. Hanke, like Wendy sewing Peter Pan's shadow on his feet, has been slowly binding the ephemeral and the real, creating a platform for the merging of pixels with atoms that he envisions as the future.
People are now babbling and swooning over this thing called a... metaverse. Facebook, and mainly Facebook, are promoting a more immersive vision in which people wear hardware rigs that block their senses and replace them with digital artifacts. This essentially throws out reality for alternate universes created by the lords at Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg stated to his employees in June that the company's overarching goal was to bring the metaverse to existence.
Hanke doesn't like this idea. Hanke has read every science fiction book and seen all of the movies that created the metaverse. It was all great fun and all wrong. His vision, which is not virtual reality, he believes will improve the real world without encouraging people to completely check it out. He felt the need to explain why this past summer in a manifesto that he self-described as "The Metaverse is a Dystopian Nightmare." Let's build a better reality. (Facebook's reply: Change the name of Meta to focus on Hanke's nightmare.
Niantic is also hard at work. Lightship is a platform that allows for the creation of augmented reality apps such as Pokemon Go. It was developed by Niantic. Led Zeppelin, Coachella and Historic Royal Palaces are some of the early developers. The next step is to map the entire world and integrate it with digital objects. Hanke said, "Think about it as a GPS without satellites and with higher accuracy." The secret is that players of Pokemon Go and other Niantic app can scan real-world "wayspots” with their smartphones during gameplay. Tuned to the right "reality channel", users will see their alter ego. This can blast them into the past, launch them into the future, or any combination thereof.
"When you were young, did you ever imagine that there was more than what you saw?"
All this will happen within a few centimeters of your retina. Niantic announced this fall that it had completed its open-source blueprint for augmented reality glasses. This will allow people to mix what they see with a kaleidoscope full of make-believe objects. It is now competing with Microsoft, Snap, Apple and Microsoft in the race to make eyeglass frames that reflect their reality.
For better or worse, whether it's Hanke or Zuckerberg's vision, what we see in the future will be more than meets our eye.
