Niantic Labs, the developer of Pokémon Go has recently acquired the LiDAR scanning app Scaniverse. The acquisition was announced by the company on Tuesday. The iOS 3D scanning app will be available on the App Store even after the acquisition as told by creator Keith Ito. It will have all the previous features that were part of its $17 annual subscription. Now users will have access to those features for free. Future feature updates will be provided by Niantic Labs.
With this acquisition, Niantic will take the help of Scaniverse to aid them in their goal to build a 3D map of the world. “A key ingredient of this vision is a dynamic spatial map of the world rendered from 3D scanned locations,” the company noted in its blog post. Now, Ito will become part of Niantic’s augmented reality engineering team. He said that “Together, we plan on taking 3D scanning to new heights by combining Niantic’s dynamic mapping with Scaniverse’s LiDAR reconstruction.”
Niantic hopes that “Scaniverse will make multi-OS scanning easier and more accessible to the Niantic Explorer community who contribute to this effort every day.” The company also plans to allow its creators to develop more lively AR experiences in its upcoming games and also in Pokémon Go, and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.
