Niantic's Peridot, the Augmented Reality Alien Dog, Is Now a Talking Tour Guide Niantic is giving its cute AR cartoon companions a voice that will let them guide you around in the real world and point out interesting facts. The feature is being demo'd first in Snap Spectacles. Imagine you're walking your dog. You walk down the Embarcadero in San Francisco on a bright sunny day, and you see the Ferry Building in the distance as you look out into the bay. Your dog turns to you, looks you in the eye, and says, "Did you know this waterfront was blocked by piers and a freeway for 100 years?"

Peridot, a video game from the makers of Pokémon Go, is using AR to energize audiences of all ages. Niantic launched the game officially on May 9, making it available for download both on Google Play and the App Store. Inspired by the popular pet games of the late nineties and early aughts like Tamagotchi and Neopets, the app allows users to "hatch" a creature and watch it explore the world around them. Unlike Tamagotchi, the pet sims will keep their owner's company for however long without dying. Players are presented at the start of the game with three eggs.

It's not often you meet someone who's genuinely changed the world, but that's what happens the day I greet Niantic CEO John Hanke. Sipping his coffee alone in a gargantuan San Franciscan boardroom, I wonder whether the man on the other end of this Zoom call realises just how often people use his former company's creation, Google Maps. Hanke's yearning to create started young. Fresh out of business school in the 1990s and already with one of the first online gaming successes to his name, he was snapped up – along with his company, Keyhole, by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and folded into the team that made Google Maps, now arguably the most useful thing on your smartphone. "None of us were interested in doing the thing where you got your driving directions, printed them out and took it with you on a sheet of paper," Hanke says.