Niantic, the developers of Pokemon GO, have announced the acquisition of Escher Reality.

Escher Reality is a company that focuses on exploring the intersection of digital and physical worlds, augmented reality (AR), and computer vision. Niantic has brought Escher into the fold as they believe their technology would advance Niantic’s work on persistent and shared AR. We may see the AR in Pokemon GO improved as a result of this acquisition.

Here are Niantic’s and Escher Reality’s full statements on the acquisition:

Planet Scale AR: Welcoming Escher Reality to Niantic

Today we are announcing the acquisition of Escher Reality, and welcoming the talented team led by Escher’s co-founders Ross Finman and Diana Hu to Niantic.

Escher’s innovations focus on exploring the intersection of digital and physical worlds, augmented reality (AR), and computer vision. Escher’s technology helps to build persistent, cross platform, multi-user experiences.

The addition of the Escher AR technology is incredibly exciting to us at Niantic as it significantly accelerates our work on persistent, shared AR as part of the Niantic real-world application platform. It’s our intention to make our cross-platform AR technology available more widely to developers later this year. Stay tuned for information on developer availability.

At Niantic, we are committed to using technology to enhance our users’ interactions with the physical world, and we are excited to embrace the Escher team as we continue to evolve and grow our platform to support planet-scale AR.

ESCHER BLOG POST

We are thrilled to announce that we are joining the wonderful team at Niantic! We’re really looking forward to integrating our work on mapping and computer vision technology into Niantic’s amazing content and AR platform. The long term vision is to help to bring shared and persistent AR experiences to millions of people around the world, and further realize AR’s impact going forward. Ultimately, we share Niantic’s goal of enriching people’s experiences by blending the physical and the digital worlds.

Escher Reality has been fortunate to work with some of the top AR studios as part of our beta, and we are grateful for their feedback.  We thank the thousands of developers who signed up for our waiting list—such overwhelming response is the dream of any start-up.

Our path has only just begun, but we would not have gotten this far without our strong and experienced team who have tackled some of the hardest problems in AR in stride. We are thankful for the support of our investors at Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Webb Investment Network, iRobot Ventures, Presence Capital, Into Ventures, and our angel investors.  We started as an idea in the MIT Sandbox two years ago and grew with the invaluable support from MassChallenge, Autodesk BUILD, and MassDigi—each being pivotal to our early success.

We are excited to develop the next wave of spatial computing in Augmented Reality at Niantic. Bringing technology we developed at Escher to the core of Niantic’s AR Platform, we can enable the next generation of experiences together and realize our collective vision sooner and better.

Ross Finman, CEO & Diana Hu, CTO