‘AR Is Where the Real Metaverse Is Going to Happen’

We can all agree that leaving the house is a marvelous thing. But what if your city stroll was enhanced by encounters with historical figures who walked those streets when they were cobblestoned? Or if it featured sightings of extinct or even imaginary species? John Hanke not only wants to see things like that happen, he has made it happen by sending millions of people on outdoor quests to capture imaginary cartoon characters.

As the CEO and founder of Niantic Labs, Hanke launched Pokémon Go in 2016, and he remains obsessed with a vision of a physical world enhanced by digital objects, the concept now called augmented reality. He has been pursuing this vision since at least 2010, when he founded Niantic as an internal startup at Google, then spun it out and launched Go. The game, in which players wander the streets with phones held to their faces trying to capture Weedles, Squirtles, and Nidorinas, was both a cultural phenomenon and a financial success, reaping over a billion dollars in revenue. Like Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow to his foot, Hanke has been gradually binding the ephemeral to the real, providing a substrate for the merger of pixels and atoms that he sees as the future.

But now people are babbling and swooning about this thing called a … metaverse. Companies like Facebook—well, mainly Facebook—are pitching a more immersive vision where people don hardware rigs that block out their senses and replace the input with digital artifacts, essentially discarding reality for alternate worlds created by the lords of Silicon Valley. “Our overarching goal … is to help bring the metaverse to life,” Mark Zuckerberg told his workforce in June.

Hanke hates this idea. He’s read all the science fiction books and seen all the films that first imagined the metaverse—all great fun, and all wrong. He believes that his vision, unlike virtual reality, will make the real world better without encouraging people to totally check out of it. This past summer, he felt compelled to explain why in a self-­described manifesto whose title says it all: “The Metaverse Is a Dystopian Nightmare. Let’s Build a Better Reality.” (Facebook’s response: Change its name to Meta so it could focus on constructing Hanke’s nightmare.)

Niantic is hard at work too. It has developed Lightship, a software platform for augmented reality apps like Pokémon Go, for both internal projects and the creations of others. Early developers include Historic Royal Palaces, Coachella, and Led Zeppelin. The next goal is to map the entire physical world to better integrate it with digital objects. “Think of it as kind of a GPS but without the satellites and with a higher degree of accuracy,” wrote Hanke. (The secret: Players of Pokémon Go and other Niantic apps can scan real-world “wayspots” with their phones during gameplay.) Those tuned to the proper “reality channel” will experience their location’s alter ego, which may blast them to the past, rocket them to a possible future, or anything in between.

All of this will eventually happen just centimeters from your retina. This fall, Niantic also announced the finalization of its open source blueprint, cocreated with the chip giant Qualcomm, for augmented reality glasses that’ll let people mingle what they see naturally with a kaleidoscope of make-­believe things. This puts it in competition with Facebook, Snap, Apple, Microsoft, and other firms striving to put their realities on eyeglass frames.

For better or for verse—whether it’s Hanke’s vision or Zuckerberg’s—what we see in the future is going to be more than meets the eye.