Hi everyone,
I’m Asim, Marketing, Brand, & Community Lead for Peridot and long-time member of Niantic. I’m very excited to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Peridot by sharing how we’re expanding the world of Peridot from the smartphone to future devices.
Today, we’re revealing a new experience from the Peridot franchise, “Hello, Dot”, an early mixed reality showcase we’ve been working on the past couple of months. If you have a Meta Quest 3, you’ll be able to try this experience now by downloading it directly from App Lab.
Hello, Dot, takes the best parts of caring for your adorable Dot companions and brings them to life through the magic of mixed reality. In this immersive experience, you’ll be able to admire just how visually stunning your Dots are up close, and develop a special bond with them as you play together. Imagine being able to hook your hands under your Dot’s arms and pick them up – and then toss them up and let them float back down into your embrace. Or perhaps your favorite song is playing in the background and you want to have a little dance party with your Dot. Or maybe you want to just relax on the couch snuggled up against your Dot. The possibilities are endless and the joy you’ll feel is REAL.
Since the early days of Peridot’s development, we have been a highly experimental team, focused on building for the future, but meeting our players on the mobile devices they’re on. That was our goal when we launched Peridot on mobile a year ago – to put a spin on the Niantic formula by releasing a game that was AR-only, and highlighting the magic of our Lightship platform’s features, such as real-time mapping, occlusion, and semantic segmentation. These features allow for us to bring your adorable Dots into your real-world in realistic and believable ways, navigating down the street as you’re on your stroll and recognizing the things they see. In the months after launch, we continued pushing the boundaries by experimenting with how we can leverage the power of Generative AI to drive gameplay in meaningful and whimsical ways. For example, your Dots now can appropriately react to the things you say, such as letting you know if it’s excited to go for a walk or hungry for food.
Recently, our team has been excited by the challenge of innovating on entirely new and upcoming platforms beyond the mobile device. Our launch of Hello, Dot is the first step in the evolution of the Peridot franchise, and only a glimpse of what we hope to bring to the various spatial computing devices of the future.
Like many of you, I dream for the day we’ll be able to see Dots by our side outdoors through true AR glasses. While that day isn’t here just yet, we’ll keep experimenting to invent for the future content and experiences we’d like to see come to life.
–Asim Ahmed (Global Product Marketing Lead) & the Peridot team
P.S. to celebrate with our community, we’ll be releasing an adorable headset cosmetic your Dot can wear in the mobile game.