Planet-scale AR in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

The company which jump-started consumer AR with the phenomenal hit Pokémon Go is back with a Harry Potter-themed game which promises to be the first real-time synchronised multi-player augmented reality experience.

It is primed for the introduction of 5G and could be the killer app which operators and handset makers need to get consumers to buy 5G smartphones and network subscriptions.

But the ambitions of its developer go far beyond simple gameplay.

The “planet-scale augmented reality platform” which underpins it is intended to function like a global operating system for applications that unite the digital world with the physical world – or as Niantic’s John Hanke puts it – uniting holograms with atoms.

“We stand at the beginning of a whole new era of augmented reality experiences and a new digital interaction for information and entertainment,” the company’s founder and CEO said at Mobile World Congress in February.

“Yes, it is being hyped, but a paradigm change like this happens maybe once every couple decades.

Pokémon Go has achieved over 2 billion downloads. The company’s vision and track record have valued Niantic at almost $4 billion, propelled by investors including Samsung Ventures and esports group aXiomatic Gaming.

It will be hoping for more of the same mass participation when it launches Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, made with the blessing of Warner Bros. and JK Rowling, later this year.

The title is built using an inhouse gaming engine “that allows hundreds of millions of players to play in a single global instance,” Hanke says.

Pokémon Go, which is built on this platform, has already demonstrated concurrent real-time usage of several million players in a single, consistent game environment, Niantic says, with demonstrated monthly usage in the hundreds of millions.

But the AR Platform, for which Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is the first application, is of another order entirely. With it, the San Francisco-based outfit aims to solve a number of the key limitations of current AR. Ideally, AR objects should be able to blend into our reality, seamlessly moving behind and around real-world objects in real time.

To tackle this, Niantic is…