Phil Keslin, Co-founder and CTO of Niantic, announced that Niantic is working with Qualcomm to execute a multi-year joint collaboration on an integrated design spanning AR glasses reference hardware, software, and cloud-components. This could lead to better performance in games like Pokémon GO and accelerate the usage of next generation AR experiences through the Niantic Real World Platform.

Niantic Collaborating with Qualcomm Technologies to Accelerate AR Software and Hardware

Today at Qualcomm Technologies’ annual Snapdragon Technology Summit 2019, it was an honor to join Hugo Swart, VP & Head of XR, on stage to introduce our intentions to execute a multi-year joint collaboration on an integrated design spanning AR glasses reference hardware, software, and cloud-components.

To ensure interoperability with today's latest AR innovations and accelerate the development of tomorrow’s devices, the platform plans to be optimized first for:

• Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ XR2 Platform: The world’s first 5G-supported XR platform. It unites Qualcomm Technologies’ expertise in XR, 5G and AI to provide breakthrough technology to help usher in a new era of XR. This premium-quality platform unveils innovative features and boasts multiple firsts for XR that can be scaled across AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality) and MR (mixed reality).
• Niantic Real World Platform: Niantic's core technology stack that includes an AR-first SDK enabling high quality, immersive end user experiences and integrated cloud services capable of "world scale" to support millions of concurrent users in a shared AR experience.

At Niantic, we’re unlocking the potential to create next generation AR experiences through the Niantic Real World Platform, and building new ways to map, share and understand reality. The Niantic Real-World Platform has been proven out by hundreds of millions of users, through consumer experiences such as Ingress, Pokémon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

Last month, we announced the Niantic Creator Program and the Niantic Beyond Reality Fund which will open up the Niantic Real World Platform to the talented developers around the world to help achieve their visions in creating location-based and AR experiences. We’re excited to also share that access to this new collaborative architecture between Niantic and Qualcomm Technologies is expected to be provided to creators via the Niantic Creator Program when available. Developers and creators can apply to the Niantic Creator Program at niantic.dev.

We’re looking forward to helping move the entire AR industry forward as we work together with Qualcomm Technologies to define a true end-to-end architecture - inclusive of hardware, software, and cloud technologies.

Source: https://nianticlabs.com/blog/qualcomm/