Lightship VPS
The key to building immersive AR experiences at real-world locations is here.
With the Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS) developers now have the power to determine a user’s position and orientation with centimeter-level accuracy — in seconds.
Accurately localize users
Before you can build immersive AR experiences at real-world locations, you need to know the exact position and orientation of your users. With only a single image frame, Lightship VPS swiftly and accurately determines a user’s position and orientation in the real-world metaverse.
Persist AR content across sessions and users
Developers now have the power to place AR content and have it persist across sessions at any VPS-activated location.
Realize the real-world AR experiences you’ve been dreaming of — from building a collaborative art installation, to designing a scavenger hunt, to guiding users on a historical walking tour.
Real-world AR experiences are waiting for you
Lightship VPS provides the tools you need to develop compelling location-based AR experiences — all that’s left is for you to build with it.
Built on our AR map
Lightship VPS is powered by a new kind of map — one made specifically for AR. See available VPS-activated locations in the map below.
Available at hundreds of thousands of locations around the world
Lightship VPS is currently available at over 170,000 locations with particularly robust coverage in six launch cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, London, and Tokyo. But that’s just the start as developers can scan and add their own locations at any time.
Built with Niantic developers, surveyors, and players
To create this map, we work collaboratively to collect millions of scans of real-world locations. Once a location is sufficiently scanned, we’re able to activate it on Lightship VPS and it becomes available for developers to build real-world AR experiences. At any time developers can scan an add their own locations to build out the map.
Frequently Asked Questions