Purpose
Niantic Spatial SDK (formerly Niantic Lightship) is used for augmented reality (AR) application development, with the core goal of helping developers anchor virtual content to the real world and enabling content to have awareness of the real environment. It is officially positioned as "AR development tools," covering areas such as localization (VPS), depth, occlusion, meshing, and semantics.
Main Capabilities
The following main features are officially listed:
- Localization (VPS): anchor experiences to the real world.
- Depth, occlusion, meshing, semantics: make content fit the real environment more closely in AR.
- Developer tools: simplify the product development process.
- Samples Project: demonstrate the SDK's main features.
Supported Platforms
Official documentation states support for Unity, Swift, and Kotlin. The documentation also has a separate entry for "Niantic Spatial SDK for Unity."
How to Use
Official "Getting Started" guidance is provided for building your first AR experience. Users who previously used Lightship.dev need to log in to scaniverse.nianticspatial.com, select "Migrate a Lightship account" to create a new account and access their original projects; see the migration guide for specific steps. Archived documentation can be downloaded.
Use Cases
Suitable for AR application development that needs to anchor content in the real world and leverage environmental awareness capabilities such as depth, occlusion, meshing, and semantics.
Limitations
The materials do not provide pricing methods, prices, specific platform compatibility versions, performance metrics, or effect data; these are not yet available.
