Niantic Labs made itself a global name when it worked with Nintendo to create augmented reality hit Pokémon Go. But the game developer that originated as an internal Google startup first got off the ground developing one of the earliest mainstream AR apps years earlier. Called Ingress, the mobile game introduced many of the same features that later became core pillars of Pokémon Go — particularly the capturing and controlling of virtual locations overlaid onto the real world. It was, however, very early in the AR trend, and Niantic’s ambitions outpaced the available software and the smartphone hardware of the time.
Now, five years after its first game launched and with much more advanced AR tools at its disposal, Niantic is rebooting...
