Niantic shows teaser of AR glasses

The founder and CEO of Niantic has posted a teaser image of what appears to be AR glasses with his company’s logo on them. Until now, Niantic only made games like Pokémon Go and Ingress, but the company hasn’t released any hardware yet.

The image that John Hanke posted, seems to show the side of glasses with holes for a speaker under the leg and the name Niantic on the side. Hanke said he is “enthusiastic about the progress we are making in enabling new types of devices that use our platform.”

It is not the first time that Niantic seems to be working on AR glasses. The game maker, who is best known for Ingress and Pokémon Go and wants to release a Pikmin AR game with Nintendo soon, was already working on a concept for AR glasses with chip designer Qualcomm in 2019.

This involved a reference platform: third parties should be able to use this to base their AR glasses on in the future. Niantic then promised to make the outcome available to developers through its Niantic Creator Program. Niantic also bought a start-up last year that developed technology for mapping environments for AR applications.