Creation of planet-scale shared augmented realities: Pokémon GO and Ingress

Ed Wu is a Senior Product Manager at Niantic who leads the engineering team of Pokémon GO

Pokémon GO co-creator Edward Wu is the senior product manager at Niantic and he leads the engineering team of Pokémon GO.  He will be at the UCSD Hojel Auditorium on Thursday, October 13, 2016, @ 3 PM to talk about the “Creation of planet-scale shared augmented realities: Pokémon GO and Ingress”.

Pokémon GO by Niantic
Pokémon GO by Niantic

Abstract: 

The ubiquity of mobile phones coupled with the availability of highly scalable NoSQL databases and containerized cloud computing infrastructure has enabled Niantic to create coherent augmented realities encompassing millions of users in a single, consistent experience overlaid on top of the real world in multiple titles, first on Ingress and subsequently on Pokémon GO. The latter has been downloaded over 500 million times and has inspired players to walk more than 4.6 billion kilometers. Niantic has conclusively demonstrated that augmented reality in practice is as much about the data and shared world state as it is about immersive hardware technology still on the horizon. We will discuss the challenges of implementing and operating a planet-scale.

Bio:ed_wu

Ed Wu is a Senior Product Manager at Niantic who leads the engineering team of Pokémon GO. Before helping to lead Niantic from its successful spin-out from Google, Dr. Wu was a Staff Software Engineer at Google where he developed machine learning models in ads quality. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in Physics in 2009 applying Bayesian parameter estimation models to cosmological data and is a proud alumnus of the UCSD computer science and physics departments, class of 2004.