The divine overlord of all things searchable, Google, has made life infinitely easier for developers of augmented reality games in the vein of Pokemon GO and Jurassic World: Alive by integrating Google Maps APIs with the Unity game engine.
This means that Unity will use Google's data on buildings, parks and roads and turn them into usable GameObjects. In practice, this would save a lot of tedious development time, freeing up developers for more creative tasks, such as texturing and general styling.
Ludia
Google said that "studios can easily reimagine our world as a medieval fantasy, a bubble gum candy land" and so on. In fact, Google cited the CEO of Ludia, the company behind Jurassic World: Alive, Alexandre Thabet as saying that they "were able to focus [their] time and energy on building detailed virtual experiences".
Google's database holds more than 100 million 3D models of buildings, roads, landmarks and parks, making it a unique and incredibly convenient resource. Indeed, Teemu Huuhtanen, CEO of Next Games, the team behind the Walking Dead: Our World, praised the technology for practically updating itself in realtime.
Of course, it's no secret that cooperating with Google is much better than cooperating with Zeus and Odin combined, seeing as how Google's holy search removal spell can undo anyone in a flash. Did you mean Tom and Jerry?
Google tooted its own horn a bit as well, pointing out that working with them leads to faster response time, improved scalability and just general security. I wonder how they failed to ascertain how dinosaurs work best on Google's gear.
Apparently, there will be a live demo at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, USA, but we suspect we'll hear quite a bit more on this soon.
