'Pokemon GO' Developer Niantic Buys AR Company Escher Reality
"Pokemon GO" developer Niantic Labs is looking to expand its operations with the recent purchase of augmented reality company Escher Reality. The startup builds backend services for cross-platform mobile AR allowing users to interact with other players and objects in the environment.
In a recent blog post on their official website, Niantic publicly welcomed Escher co-founders Ross Finman and Diana Hu and their team. In addition to backend AR services, Escher's specialities also include exploring the intersection of digital and physical worlds and computer vision.
"The addition of the Escher AR technology is incredibly exciting to us at Niantic as it significantly accelerates our work on persistent, shared AR as part of the Niantic real-world application platform," Niantic founder and CEO John Hanke said in the post. It's our intention to make our cross-platform AR technology available more widely to developers later this year. Stay tuned for information on developer availability.
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With the acquisition, Niantic now has access to functionality for shared experiences which was unavailable in both Google's ARCore and Apple's ARKit. Persistent AR means that AR systems remember where users placed objects in your AR home. It can also tell when another person is moving them around and keep users updated accordingly.
Escher Reality was among the clear standouts from its Y Combinator class. Most of its appeal came from being able to deliver backend services to a platform that is on everyone's lips but have very little idea of what it actually is. Simply put, Escher is doing the job no one wants to do.
The terms of the deal weren't disclosed making it hard to know the company's valuation post-Y Combinator. Nevertheless, it has some well-known venture capital funds behind it including Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Webb Investment Network, iRobot Ventures, Presence Capital, Into Ventures and others.
Prior to Escher, the "Pokemon GO" developer purchased the team behind Evertoon back in November. However, the acquisition was aimed at developing social systems for its community rather than expanding its AR capability.
