The augmented-reality game Pokemon Go took the world by storm last year, and if you come to the Game Developers Conference later this month you'll learn exactly how Niantic built it to work consistently on a global scale!
Edward Wu is Niantic's director of software engineering, and in his GDC 2017 talk on "Creation of Planet-Scale Shared Augmented Realities: 'Pokémon GO' and 'Ingress'" he'll discuss the challenges of implementing and operating a planet-scale service with demanding latency and consistency constraints, in the face of usage 50x planned capacity.
Wu's goal is to help talk attendees realize how a combination of mobile phone sensors, NoSQL databases and containerized server infrastructure can create a whole new genre of games that have much greater scaling properties than previous SQL-focused technology.
Check out his talk and you should also walk away with a greater appreciation for how augmented reality games are as much about the shared social experience of a single consistent world as they are novel hardware integrations.
For more details on this and other talks taking place at GDC 2017, head over to the conference Session Scheduler. For more information on GDC 2017, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
