Are you ready for true Pokemon Go AR? Niantic’s CEO John Hanke teased an image of what might be AR glasses with the company’s name on the side.
You can see the image in the tweet below with what looks like a speaker, strap and the edges of what might be an AR glasses display. The image appeared on Hanke’s Twitter account with the tease “Exciting to see the progress we’re making to enable new kinds of devices that leverage our platform.”
Exciting to see the progress we’re making to enable new kinds of devices that leverage our platform… pic.twitter.com/yYglk4q89G
— John Hanke (@johnhanke) March 29, 2021
That’s of course not much to go on but it would be a natural evolution for the company which announced a collaboration with Qualcomm in 2019. Qualcomm develops core chip technology used by other manufacturers, including inside the Oculus Quest 2, with the company also making available to partners reference designs that make it easier to develop VR and AR hardware.
Here’s Qualcomm’s latest reference design for tethered AR the company showed off in February of this year:
AR glasses face difficult challenges with power consumption and bright outdoor lighting that will make compelling all-in-one glasses a very difficult prospect. That’s why current approaches offload certain processing tasks to a nearby device, like a phone. The unsolved problems of offering slim glasses that scan your environment and show fully solid objects no matter your lighting conditions means the technology is still years away for tech giants like Apple and Facebook.
Still, games like Pokemon Go are important enough to many people that if a Pikachu could believably pop out from behind a bush in your yard some folks would connect a pair of glasses to their phone just to have that experience.
