“Pokémon Go Buddy Adventure feature will not only allow you to interact with your own Pokémon via the AR camera, it will also provide Trainers with a shared experience of seeing their real world friends interacting with their buddy pokémon in real time,” Diana Hu, Niantic’s director of AR Platform, wrote in a blog post. “Buddy Adventure is also cross platform, so whether your friends are on an iPhone or Android device, you will still see them when the feature is enabled.”
Niantic also has a few other announcements related to its AR platform. It’s opening up its Wayfarer program, which allows users to suggest real-world locations for the community to review and approve for games like Ingress and Pokémon Go, to small businesses. That way, a company like Starbucks or 7-Eleven can apply to have their locations loaded into Niantic’s Wayfarer database, which adds them to in-game maps as “Sponsored Locations.”
Niantic is also bringing its impressive AR occlusion technology, which allows AR objects to interact more realistically with real-world ones, to its Real World Platform, the set of technologies and developer tools Niantic makes available to third-party app and game makers. One final piece of news is Niantic’s new Beyond Reality Fund and Creator Program, two new initiatives that will see the company give out funding and access to its Real World Platform to AR startups and app makers.