Niantic’s Peridot, the Augmented Reality Alien Dog, Is Now a Talking Tour Guide
Imagine that you are walking your dog. It interacts with the world around you: it sniffs certain things and relies on others. You’re walking down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a sunny day and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out across the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in the eye and says, “Did you know this waterfront has been blocked by piers and a highway for 100 years? »
OK, now imagine your dog looks like an alien and only you can see it. This is the vision of a new capability created for the AR experience from Niantic Labs. Peridot.
Niantic, also developer of the global AR giant Pokémon Gohopes to expand on its vision of expanding the metaverse into the real world by empowering people to augment the space around them with digital artifacts. Peridot is a mobile game that allows users to customize and interact with their own little Dots, dog-sized digital companions that appear on your phone’s screen and can appear as if they are interacting with objects in the world in the view of your camera lens. They are very cute and yes, they look a lot like Pokémon. Now they can talk.
Peridot started as a mobile game in 2022, then gained generative AI features. The game has since passed into the hands of Niantic Spatial, a startup founded in April that aims to turn geospatial data into an accessible playground for its AR ambitions. Now called Peridot beyondit has been enabled in Snap Glasses.
Hume AI, a startup running a broad language model aimed at making chatbots more empathetic, is now partnering with Niantic Spatial to give voice to Dots on Snap’s Spectacles. The move was originally announced back in September, but is now ready to go to the public and will be shown off this week at Snap’s Lens Fest developer event.
