Lightship will let mobile apps identify whether a user’s camera is pointed at the sky or water, map the surfaces and depth of an environment in real-time, or place a virtual object behind a physical one.
Best known for creating one of the most successful mobile games ever, Pokémon Go. With Lightship, The company is “opening the vault of tech that we’ve been using to build our products” to help others build “planet-scale AR apps.”
Lightship has been in development for quite some time. But starting Monday, it’s open for any developer to access. Most of the software toolkit is free, though will charge for a feature that can let multiple devices access shared AR experiences simultaneously. The company already planning a major update to Lightship for next year, building what calls a “visual positioning system” for AR glasses.
By using the new system, glasses with displays in them will be able to understand exactly where they are in the real world, which will let virtual objects (such as a Pikachu) stay anchored persistently to real-world locations. It’s a critical component needed to make AR glasses, such as the kind that is built with Qualcomm, useful.
Previously ran Google Maps before starting, says the goal with Lightship is to “basically set a pattern for what AR can be.” While tech giants like Meta and Apple are building similar software tools, he thinks Lightship’s support for iOS and Android will make it an attractive offering to developers.
“The state of the world today is sort of 50/50 between Android and iOS,” he says. “And I think it’s going to be much more diversified in the world of AR glasses. So a solution that actually solves the developer problem of being able to write something and create something that’s going to work across multiple platforms is really important.”
wrote a blog post calling the idea of the metaverse a “dystopian nightmare.” He’s against the idea of technology pulling people out of the real world. Unlike the VR metaverse championed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he wants Lightship developers to build AR apps that keep people engaged with the physical.
“There’s a fork in the road,” he says. “One path goes in this direction of apps that are not connected to the world around us and not helping us connect with the people who we are around.” The other path is taking with Lightship, according is “encouraging people to do things together with other folks who are alive.”
Comments;-
"Your focus determines your reality" Jinn (Star Wars has some gems)
The take that VR is more isolating than VR disconnects people from the real world and each other is shallow and borderline I think just marketing on his part to differentiate.
AR can disconnect us from the real world and each other as much as VR. Our mobile phones, Television, Newspapers, pancake video games can all disconnect us or connect us to the real world and each other. It’s how they are used.
People have expressed great interest in dressing up like who they want, doing the things they want, building the stuff they want, and generally shaping their appearance and personality in ways that don’t affect their real self. We’ve seen this in Second Life, World of Warcraft, Minecraft, Fortnite, and so many other online worlds. People pay actual money to be distinctive in those places. They’re essentially metaverses.
The issue is, now every big company will fight to be the de facto general-purpose metaverse.
VR isn’t good enough for a true metaverse. I can’t even keep my headset on for more than 30 minutes or so without discomfort. Until the many issues with VR are solved, the "metaverse" will just be corporate hype. AR, however, will have a much larger impact on society, but it won’t be a "metaverse" like Stephenson describes.
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