Niantic’s Peridot, the Augmented Reality Alien Dog, Is Now a Talking Tour Guide

Imagine you’re walking your dog. It interacts with the world around you—sniffing some things, relieving itself on others. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in the eye, and says, “Did you know this waterfront was blocked by piers and a freeway for 100 years?”

OK now imagine your dog looks like an alien and only you can see it. That’s the vision for a new capability created for the Niantic Labs AR experience Peridot.

Niantic, also the developer of the worldwide AR behemoth Pokémon Go, hopes to build out its vision of extending the metaverse into the real world by giving people the means to augment the space around them with digital artifacts. Peridot is a mobile game that lets users customize and interact with their own little Dots—dog-sized digital companions that appear on your phone’s screen and can look like they’re interacting with the world objects in the view of your camera lens. They’re very cute, and yes, they look a lot like Pokémon. Now, they can talk.

Peridot started as a mobile game in 2022, then got infused with generative AI features. The game has since moved into the hands of Niantic Spatial, a startup created in April that aims to turn geospatial data into an accessible playground for its AR ambitions. Now called Peridot Beyond, it has been enabled in Snap’s Spectacles.

Hume AI, a startup running a large language model that aims to make chatbots seem more empathetic, is now partnering with Niantic Spatial to bring a voice to the Dots on Snap’s Spectacles. The move was initially announced in September, but now it’s ready for the public and will be demonstrated at Snap’s Lens Fest developer event this week.

Snap's latest Spectacles, its augmented reality smart glasses.

Courtesy of Snap

Alan Cowen, Hume AI’s founder, sees the project as a glimpse into the future of computing. “At some point, everyone is going to have AR in their lives in some format,” Cowen says. “You'll be talking to companions that help guide you through the world.”

Call on Dot while wearing the Spectacles and it will look like a 3D image interacting with the world around you. Ask it to find you walking directions to a nearby restaurant and it will show a little footprint path heading that direction in your field of vision. If you see something fun along the way, Dot might stop and comment on whatever you’re looking at.

“Isn't it way easier when you're in Tokyo to follow your friend who lives in Tokyo through the subway system than it is to follow the map?” says Alicia Berry, executive producer at Niantic Spatial. “We wanted to re-create that as close to reality as possible to reduce the stress of navigation but also just kind of make people feel calm.”

Niantic Spatial released a reveal video of this in action earlier this year, which gives a good idea of how the company hopes Dot will act and speak (if you can get past the cringy dialog).

Dot guides you along the Embarcadero in San Francisco.

Courtesy of Snap

“This is really a storytelling experience,” says Cowen. “It's curated for certain things. It is an AI that sees what you see. It is intelligent and it is knowledgeable and it's an empathetic friend.”

For the past year, Snap's chunky but functional Spectacles have been available to developers eager to tinker with their augmented reality glasses. Turning cartoon dogs into chatty tour guides is a way to show off what these key players hope the future of AR glasses will be. The caveat is that this service is available only for Snap Spectacles, so if you are comfortable walking around in public while wearing these big, chunky frames, you can talk to your make-believe alien dog. You also have a stronger resilience against social anxiety than I.

The tour guide experience won’t be available outside the Snap demo yet, as Niantic Spatial wants to take the time to ensure that, unlike Pokémon Go, the digital avatars won’t lead to anyone falling off cliffs.

“This is just our first step,” Berry says. “Let's figure out the personality.”