Today we’re excited to share that developers can now add the power of Scaniverse and Niantic to their applications with the new Niantic Scanning Framework available in Lightship ARDK 2.5.

The Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit (ARDK) is a cross-platform, Unity-based solution that gives developers tools to create immersive, multiplayer experiences and bring them to life in the real world.

With the Scanning Framework available in ARDK, developers now have an all-in-one Unity solution to enable end-users to capture, edit, and share 3D content — all within their own application.

Introducing the Niantic Scanning Framework in ARDK 2.5

Build immersive experiences with real-world objects

Scanning Framework offers both the scanning experience you’re used to with Scaniverse and the tools to expand location-based AR experiences.

With this release, you can embed the Scaniverse scanning framework directly into your Unity App and access pre-packaged tools to enable a user-friendly scanning experience. These tools include on-screen guidance for mesh capturing, scan uploading, and the chance to instantly view and inspect the 3d mesh on a device. Based on your use case or level of Unity expertise, you can also customize your scanning experience. By default, you can use the same scanning experience and styling of Scaniverse or pick and choose from our default assets and settings to create exactly what you need.

Demo of the Measuranimal app by Designium, built with the Scanning Framework private beta

Expand where you can create precise, location-based AR experiences

With the Scanning Framework, developers interested in creating location-based AR experiences also have the tools to help build a precise map of the world designed specifically for AR.

Last year, Niantic released the Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS), which gives developers the tools to quickly determine the position and orientation with centimeter-level accuracy. With this system, developers can now create immersive AR experiences tied to real-world locations.

To enable Lightship VPS, Niantic is building an AR map of the world by collecting and processing scans, or short video snippets, of real-world locations. Once an area is sufficiently scanned, it is activated on Lightship VPS and becomes available for developers to build real-world AR experiences.

Submitting these scans used to only be possible through a few applications, but now developers can offer their end-users a chance to scan their favorite locations and contribute to activate new VPS locations worldwide.

This release also includes the Scan Target API to help users discover nearby locations waiting to be scanned and activated in Lightship VPS. Users will receive on-device quality checks as they scan to ensure a scan is fit for VPS mapping before uploading.

Get started with the Niantic Scanning Framework

The Niantic Scanning Framework is now available in the Niantic Lightship ARDK 2.5. To start building, register for a Lightship developer account and download the Lightship ARDK.