Beyond Reality Initiative

Niantic

Platform and ecosystem development across geo-located media

Design Focus

• The streets and parks as a narrative surface and/or gameboard

• Identifying shared constraints and affordances across emerging hardware

• Building frameworks for experimentation

• Aligning creative direction with platform capabilities

The initiative brought together multiple teams working on early augmented reality platforms.

The work focused on clarifying constraints, surfacing common challenges, and helping teams make strong design decisions within uncertain technical boundaries.

Scope

• Collaboration with dozens of developers of different backgrounds and experience

• Cross-disciplinary coordination between creative and technical leads

• Prototyping interactive systems for augmented reality

This was systems work at the platform level — less about a single artifact and more about shaping conditions for many projects to succeed. The outcomes informed the platform roadmap, and improved development processes, utilized across multiple developer-facing initiatives.