Niantic Lightship

Niantic Lightship is a toolset offered by Niantic that aims to facilitate the creation of the real-world metaverse by integrating augmented reality (AR) content with the physical environment. According to the vendor, Lightship provides a range of features including world-mapping, semantic segmentation, and shared AR capabilities. The product is designed to cater to businesses of various sizes, from small startups to large enterprises, and is utilized by professionals and industries such as game developers, AR content creators, artists and designers, event organizers, and educational institutions.

Key Features

Lightship ARDK: According to the vendor, the Lightship ARDK is a cross-platform development kit for Android and iOS that allows developers to build immersive, multiplayer AR experiences. The ARDK seamlessly integrates with Unity and offers features such as depth sensing for realistic depth estimation, session-persistent meshing for incorporating the environment into experiences, networking APIs for multiplayer synchronization, peer-to-peer messaging, lightweight gaming functions, and session authentication and encryption.

Lightship Maps: The vendor states that Lightship Maps provides customizable basemaps specifically designed for augmented reality. It offers vector maps for smooth zooming and panning, map caching for faster loading, and integration with Unity Job System for enhanced development. Lightship Maps also allows developers to leverage map metadata for interactive and immersive experiences, generate procedural content based on the map, and customize colors, overlays, and data. Integration with Lightship ARDK enables location-based AR experiences.

Lightship VPS: According to the vendor, Lightship VPS offers a Visual Positioning System (VPS) that enables accurate localization of users with centimeter-level accuracy. It allows developers to activate VPS-activated locations for building real-world AR experiences and create 3D scans of real-world locations for VPS activation. The vendor claims that Lightship VPS provides over 100,000 available VPS-activated locations worldwide, with robust coverage in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, London, and Tokyo. Integration with Lightship ARDK facilitates the placement and persistence of AR content.

Roadmap: The vendor promises regular updates and additions to the Lightship platform, with major updates every six weeks and significant updates every six months. They emphasize transparent communication of upcoming features and functionality to enable developers to plan and adapt their projects accordingly.

Pricing: According to the vendor, Lightship offers detailed information about pricing plans and options for utilizing its features. The platform provides a transparent pricing structure tailored to different levels of usage and access, ensuring flexibility for developers.

Resources: The vendor offers extensive documentation to help developers learn and understand the various features of Lightship. Additionally, they provide brand assets, including logos and other resources, for enhancing the visual presentation of AR experiences. Developers can engage with the community through a blog, forum, events, and Discord, and explore a showcase of projects and demos built with Lightship for inspiration and collaboration.