Niantic CEO John Hanke: Games are the primordial soup for tech evolution

Niantic CEO John Hanke summoned up the ghost of Arthur C. Clarke when discussing augmented reality with the famous quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But to get technology to that point, experimentation is necessary — and games are the perfect proving ground.

“One of the great things about games and gamers as a way to pioneer that new technology is that gamers are willing to put up with some glitches and some imperfections in tech, which makes it just a great area to really push some of these new technologies forward into the frontier where things don’t always work exactly the way you want them to,” said Hanke.