Niantic acquires AR development platform 8th Wall
Niantic, a well-known AR game software development company, recently acquired 8th Wall, a developer specializing in online AR services. There may be many users who just listen to the name of Niantic and can’t remember which company it is. But if you talk about Niantic’s products, you should have heard more or less. Successful mobile AR games like Pokemon Go, Ingress, and Harry Potter Wizards Unite were developed by Niantic. However, in comparison, the 8th Wall may not be known to many people. The 8th Wall is a company founded in 2019, mainly providing PC, mobile platforms, and AR/VR equipment AR development platform services.
“Pokemon GO Wallpaper” by Adam Purves (S3ISOR) is marked with CC BY 2.0.
“There is so much potential for web-based augmented reality and we will continue to unlock this through the lens of Niantic’s real-world AR universe,” said 8th Wall CEO and founder Erik Murphy-Chutorian. “We are looking forward to working with Niantic to create the best planet-scale platform technologies to foster even more magical shared experiences.”
After the acquisition, 8th Wall will continue to operate as an independent entity and will join Niantic’s AR engineer organization. In addition, the acquisition is said to further expand Niantic’s Lightship developer kit.
Niantic has actually made a number of acquisitions in the past year, including social media platform Lowkey, API solutions developer Hoss, 3D scanning app Scaniverse for mobile platforms, and social gaming platform Mayhem. It can be seen that Niantic is still making efforts in AR, and maybe the next AR game is already on the way.
