It’s all Go for 5G fun
The future of mobile gaming
SOCIAL games like Pokemon
Go are set to get a boost from 5G connectivity and innovations in cloud computing that promise to take mobile gaming to new heights.
Niantic Labs CEO John Hanke, the little-known Silicon Valley genius behind Pokemon Go, was at the recent Mobile World Congress touting the future of augmented reality (AR) mobile gaming.
That future involves faster computer response times and networks that can handle many more users doing network intensive things (like playing Pokemon Go) while all being in the same geographical location. And it’s arriving just in time for the company’s Harry Potter mobile AR game due out later this year.
Depending on who you ask at MWC, you’ll get a different response about whether 5G has been overhyped. But the Niantic Labs boss has high hopes for the new era of connectivity.
“We’re actually really excited about 5G,” he told an audience during a keynote address at the event in Barcelona.
“We’re really pushing the boundaries of what we can do on today’s networks. We need 5G to deliver the experiences we are imagining.”
When it comes to its upcoming Harry Potter title, players will learn spells, explore real world neighbourhoods and cities to discover and fight beasts and team up with others to take down bad guys.
“Harry Potter: Wizards Unite will leverage the full stack of the Niantic Platform while also providing an opportunity to pioneer all new technology and game play mechanics,” Niantic stated.
One emerging technology coming with 5G is something called edge computing.
Edge computing brings cloud resources like computation power and storage closer to devices and end-users by using small power cell stations to enable data to travel at high speeds without having to travel long distances to a cloud or data centre. It’s basically a new kind of computing that’s part content-delivery network and part cloud.
Niantic teamed with Deutsche Telekom to produce a mobile game at the telco’s booth at MWC that let players run around and shoot balls at each other through the window of a Samsung Galaxy S10 phone. While simple, it was quite a lot of fun in a very frantic kind of way.
Phil Keslin is the chief technology officer and founder of Niantic Inc and explained to news.com.au how edge computing would make fast-paced AR mobile games like this work properly.
“The game benefits from very low latency interaction in order to track the individuals, who is firing at who, and keep track of all the scores,” he said
For that super quick response time “you need a trusted agent that is sitting close to the user”.
“We basically put a machine at the antenna so that the round trip time from the phones through the computer layer back to the phones is less than about 10–20 milliseconds. That’s what enables the high speed game play that is necessary for this,” he said.
Niantic is all about making large-scale social games to get people to exercise and spend time face-to-face with other gamers.
“We all need a little nudge to do some exercise. We’re trying to build products to encourage that,” Mr Hanke said.
It’s also all about old-fashioned social interaction.
“There’s medical evidence that face-to-face interactions lead to better general wellbeing,” he added.