Niantic, developer of Pokémon Go, has laid out its long-term plan for a "real-world" metaverse based on our global reality – rather than an entirely virtual one of the kind seen in Ready Player One.
In an extended blog post titled "The Metaverse is a Dystopian Nightmare, Let's Build a Better Reality", company founder John Hanke has discussed his vision for how technology can be harnessed to build a better version of our world which strengthens in-person interactions – while criticising the idea of technology designed to abandon our reality and instead play inside a computer simulation.
This is all long-term future stuff, so there's no direct reference to Pokémon Go's ongoing big debate around pandemic interaction distance changes. (It also arrives alongside news of another Niantic company acquisition – this time of fancy 3D scanning app Scaniverse.) But there are certainly comments here which reinforce Niantic's long-term ethos for its games – and Pokémon Go in particular – which touch on issues raised in that debate, and perhaps further illuminate Niantic's own position in it.
