Pokémon GO session about the “Creation of Planet-Scale Shared Augmented Realities” announced for GDC 2017

Another session focused primarily on Pokémon GO has been announced for the 2017 Game Developers Conference (GDC). It is called “Creation of Planet-Scale Shared Augmented Realities” and will also talk about another AR game called Ingress. The session will be helmed by Edward Wu, the director of software engineering at Niantic. Read on below for the official description of this upcoming event:

The ubiquity of mobile phones coupled with the availability of highly scalable NoSQL databases and containerized cloud computing infrastructure has enabled Niantic to create coherent augmented realities encompassing millions of users in a single, consistent experience overlaid on top of the real world in multiple titles, first on ‘Ingress’ and subsequently on ‘Pokémon GO’. The latter has been downloaded over 500 million times and has inspired players to walk more than 4.6 billion kilometers. Niantic has conclusively demonstrated that augmented reality in practice is as much about the data and shared world state as it is about immersive hardware technology still on the horizon. This talk will discuss the challenges of implementing and operating a planet-scale service with demanding latency and consistency constraints, in the face of usage 50x planned capacity.

Takeaway:

Attendees should realize that a combination of mobile phone sensors, NoSQL databases and containerized server infrastructure can create a whole new genre of games that have much greater scaling properties than previous SQL-focused technology. They should also take away that augmented reality is as much about the shared social experience of a single consistent world as it is novel hardware integrations.

Intended Audience:

Both mobile and server engineers working on MMOs and augmented reality games. Prerequisites will include an undergraduate level understanding of databases, online services and mobile phone development.

Source: GDC