Niantic Lightship

Niantic Lightship is an augmented reality developer platform created by Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go. Its central component is the Augmented Reality Developer Kit (ARDK), a software development kit that exposes the world-scale AR technology Niantic built for its own location-based games. The platform's tools run on standard smartphones and do not require lidar hardware.

Niantic announced the ARDK in 2021, made it publicly available worldwide on November 8, 2021, and added a Visual Positioning System (VPS) in 2022 for persistent, location-anchored, multi-user AR. After Niantic sold its games division to Scopely in 2025, the platform and Niantic's geospatial technology moved to a spun-off company, Niantic Spatial, where it continues as the Niantic Spatial Platform.

Niantic Lightship
Information
Type	Augmented reality SDK
Industry	Augmented reality
Developer	Niantic Spatial (formerly Niantic)
Operating System	Android, iOS
Supported Devices	Smartphones and tablets (no lidar required)
Release Date	November 8, 2021
Website	https://www.nianticspatial.com

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History

Niantic developed Lightship internally to power the world-scale gameplay in titles such as Pokemon Go, then opened the underlying technology to outside developers. The company described the ARDK as moving from a private alpha early in 2021 to a private beta announced on May 11, 2021, with developers directed to sign up at niantic.dev.

On November 8, 2021 Niantic opened the Lightship platform globally to all developers. The same announcement introduced Niantic Ventures, a fund initially capitalized at 20 million dollars to invest in companies building AR applications. Core mapping and understanding APIs were offered free, while the multiplayer API was free for apps under 50,000 monthly active users and charged above that threshold.

In March 2022 Niantic acquired 8th Wall, a web-based AR (WebAR) development platform, in what it called its largest acquisition to date; the deal added browser-based AR tooling to the Lightship lineup. Financial terms were not disclosed.

On October 30, 2023 Niantic released ARDK 3.0, a rebuild of the SDK around Unity's AR Foundation. The release extended AR Foundation with cross-platform features for Android and iOS, added meshing that works on non-lidar devices, multiplayer co-localization through VPS or image targets, 20 semantic segmentation classes, and content anchoring and persistence. It was made generally available for free with a developer account.

Features

The ARDK adds AR capabilities on top of a phone's camera without requiring depth-sensing hardware. Its main components are:

Feature	Description
Real-time meshing	Builds a live 3D mesh of surfaces and topography around the user so virtual objects can rest on, collide with, and react to the real environment.
Depth and occlusion	Estimates per-pixel depth so virtual objects are hidden behind real ones in the correct order; works on devices without lidar and at greater range than lidar.
Semantic segmentation	Classifies regions of the camera view (ground, sky, water, buildings, and other categories) so content can behave differently in different parts of a scene; ARDK 3.0 exposes 20 classes.
Shared AR (multiplayer)	Lets multiple users share a common AR space and frame of reference; the original launch supported up to five concurrent players on Android and iOS.
Visual Positioning System	Localizes a device against a 3D map of real-world locations with centimeter-level precision for persistent, location-anchored AR.

Visual Positioning System

Niantic introduced the Lightship Visual Positioning System at its first developer event, the Lightship Summit in San Francisco, on May 24, 2022. VPS lets an app determine where a device is, and which way it is facing, by matching the camera feed against a pre-built 3D map, rather than relying on GPS alone. Niantic said the system localizes devices with centimeter precision in enabled areas, which allows AR content to stay anchored to a real place and be shared by multiple users.

At launch VPS covered about 30,000 activated public locations, each a roughly 10 by 10 meter playspace, across San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle, with Niantic stating it expected coverage to expand to more than 100 cities by the end of 2022. On September 22, 2022 Niantic extended VPS to the browser as Lightship VPS for Web, delivered through the 8th Wall platform.

Relationship to other AR frameworks

Lightship is built to extend rather than replace the platform AR frameworks. From ARDK 3.0 onward the SDK layers on Unity's AR Foundation, which itself wraps Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore. This lets developers keep using the standard AR Foundation subsystems and add Niantic's features, such as cross-platform meshing, semantic segmentation, and VPS, on top. Several of these capabilities depend on simultaneous localization and mapping and computer vision running on the device.

Transition to Niantic Spatial

On March 12, 2025 Niantic announced an agreement to sell its games business, including Pokemon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now, to Scopely for 3.5 billion dollars, a transaction valued at about 3.85 billion dollars for Niantic equity holders once additional cash was included. Niantic's geospatial technology, including the Lightship platform and VPS, was spun off into a new company, Niantic Spatial, capitalized with 250 million dollars (200 million from Niantic's balance sheet and a 50 million investment from Scopely) and led by Niantic co-founder John Hanke. The spin-off was finalized on May 29, 2025.

Niantic Spatial positions itself as a geospatial AI company and is building a Large Geospatial Model trained on a proprietary database of more than 30 billion posed images. The developer platform was rebranded under the Niantic Spatial name (documentation and downloads moved to nianticspatial.com), with the SDK now described as the Niantic Spatial Platform or Niantic SDK for Unity. In March 2026 Hanke moved to the role of executive chairman and Inhi Cho Suh was appointed chief executive officer.

Current status

As of 2026 the platform remains active under Niantic Spatial. ARDK 3.13.0 was released on April 23, 2025, and older versions, including the ARDK 2.x line, entered a six-month support window that ran from May 1, 2025 to November 1, 2025. Niantic continues to offer a free developer tier with monthly usage limits on core features, VPS calls, and shared AR sessions.

The 8th Wall WebAR platform, acquired in 2022, is being wound down: Niantic is moving it to an open-source distribution and has shut down its hosted services, including user logins, the cloud editor, and the web-based studio, in a staged process reported in early 2026.