Niantic's cute new virtual pet app Peridot is a very different beast to Pokémon Go, and all the better for it. S…
Niantic's cute new virtual pet app Peridot is a very different beast to Pokémon Go, and all the better for it. Simplistic on the surface but stuffed full of bleeding-edge AR technology underneath, the Tamagotchi-like app is born from years of progress by Niantic's creative and technological halves, resulting in the developer's most interesting project since Pokémon Go in 2016.
Niantic has spent years developing this AR tech through experiments with its own platform and features in its other games, and it has plenty of fancy-sounding words to describe what is going on under the surface: obstacle occlusion, real-world understanding, semantic segmentation.
That means periodically taking care of your Peridot's food and enrichment, teaching them tricks, and showing them more of the world around you. Niantic's typical drive to explore and get outside is still here, of course. Daily objectives, or Desires, include simplistic tasks like"Walk 1000 Steps", which can be achieved with the app closed. But your Peridot will also ask you to go look at a tree, or find some flowers for it to forage in.
A fictional narrative behind the game will also be released, explaining more about where Peridots have come from and the need to repopulate the world with their whimsy. Niantic is also keen to explore the possibilities that come from an intellectual property it owns for itself - free from the requirements of an external franchise holder, and able to develop its own spin-offs in other forms of media.
On the creative side, Peridot is being lead by Ziah Fogel, a former Pixar employee who sees similarities in how the app takes this technology and uses it to create an engaging setting where technical prowess can simply blend into the background."Niantic is like where Pixar was 20 years ago, where there's new and interesting problems to solve, and there's a back and forth between the creative and the technical side," Fogel tells me.
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