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Niantic embraces Meta’s Quest 3 headset

Pokemon Go maker Niantic took a step outside of its comfort zone this week: The company unveiled a new mixed reality experience called Hello Dot exclusively on the Quest 3 Thursday.

Based on the company’s Peridot AR game an launched on the game’s one-year anniversary, Hello Dot is being billed as an early mixed reality showcase – an experiment that is being distributed via Meta’s App Lab, the section of the Quest App Store that’s often being used for less-polished or niche titles. But for Niantic, a company whose CEO not too long ago called the metaverse “a dystopian nightmare” and warned against getting “sidetracked by an indoor-centric vision of spatial computing,”  embracing the Quest 3 is also a notable evolution.

“Our mission is outdoors. That is still where our North Star is,” I was told by Maryam Sabor, Niantic’s Head of Business, Platforms & Headsets, this week. But with truly immersive AR glasses still some years away, Niantic is also embracing other form factors, including mixed reality headsets like the Quest 3, and even smart glasses like Meta’s Ray-Bans that don’t have a visual component at all.

Read on to learn more about Hello Dot, Niantic’s embrace of mixed reality, the possibility of future Niantic titles being available on both phones and headsets, and the latest on the reference design AR glasses Niantic built in partnership with Qualcomm (spoiler alert: don’t expect the company to make any more of those).

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