Pokemon Go maker Niantic is offering developers broader access to its newly rebranded Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit (ARDK).
Lightship is the new name for the Niantic Real World Platform, which according to the studio can be used to create “immersive, imaginative, and unique AR applications.”
The ARDK was launched as a private alpha earlier this year, but is now being made available to more developers in private beta form.
Niantic explained it enhanced Lightship in three key areas following the alpha, bolstering the ARDK’s real-time mapping, semantic segmentation, and multiplayer functionalities. As a result, the company said developers will be able to easily create “dynamic” experiences for a multitude of devices.
“Niantic Lightship encompasses the full Niantic platform, including the suite of tools and services that power Niantic games, from Ingress to Pokemon Go to our partnership with Nintendo to bring the Pikmin universe to our community. Niantic Lightship sets the industry standard for mapping and shared, planetary-scale AR experiences,” said the company in a blog post.
“Niantic Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit is a robust set of tools that enable developers to create multiplayer experiences and bring them to life with depth, physics, occlusions, and semantic segmentation.”
You can learn more about Lightship and sign up for the private beta over on the Niantic website.