Our Tech

Build immersive real‑world AR experiences for Unity and Web

We’re tackling two major technical undertakings:

Building a map that lets you anchor people and objects to the real world

Enabling shared experiences for 100M+ people with the Lightship Platform

Lightship

Our platform. Your magic.

From scanning and augmenting locations in real-time, to enabling developers to tie experiences precisely to real-world locations, to enabling powerful multiplayer experiences, Niantic Lightship gives developers access to the same tools we use to build our most popular games.

Semantic segmentation

Occlusion

Understanding

Know your surroundings

Building or tree? Grass or sky? Our tools for semantic segmentation, occlusion, and object detection understand the environmental elements in a place by using deep learning-based computer vision technology to distinguish real-world objects in real time. With powerful features like meshing and depth perception, you can the place objects right in the scene. That means your AR objects will behave in believable ways – without any coding on your part.

Depth perception

Meshing

Mapping

Build at real-world locations

Before you can build immersive AR experiences at real-world locations, you need to know the exact position and orientation of your users. With only a single image frame, Lightship VPS swiftly and accurately determines a user’s position and orientation in the real world. And with Lightship Maps, guide users to real-world experiences with customizable basemaps built specifically for AR.

Made with Lightship

See what people have created so far.

Turning the world into an endless skatepark with real-world AR

Creating a global canvas for AR

Building stories outside of the museum walls

Making mindfulness as accessible as possible

Bringing the creative world of manga alive