Niantic Labs announced that a live multiplayer feature for Pokémon Go called "Buddy Adventure" might make it's way to the game before the end of the year!

The feature is based on Niantic’s Codename: Neon multiplayer AR technology, which it first showed off last year. It effectively allows two separate devices to create interactive AR objects within the same frame so that two players of a game like Pokémon Go can each see the same AR objects when viewing the world through their iOS or Android camera lens. 

With Buddy Adventure, Niantic says Pokémon Go players will be able to pick a buddy Pokémon to pair with, using the existing Buddy system. You’ll then be able to go on an adventure with another player! It’s not quite clear what that adventure entails just yet, but a cute demo video featuring Pikachu showed a more realistic version of the creature you could interact with and feed berries. In a separate part of the video, Niantic shows how two players and their respective buddy pokémon can all exist together in the same frame.

So player one can interact with player two’s buddy pokémon and vice versa. You can all also stand together and snap a photo.

“Pokémon Go Buddy Adventure feature will not only allow you to interact with your own Pokémon via the AR camera, it will also provide Trainers with a shared experience of seeing their real world friends interacting with their buddy pokémon in real time,” Diana Hu, Niantic’s director of AR Platform, wrote in a blog post. 

“Buddy Adventure is also cross platform, so whether your friends are on an iPhone or Android device, you will still see them when the feature is enabled.”Niantic also has a few other announcements related to its AR platform. It’s opening up its Wayfarer program, which allows users to suggest real-world locations for the community to review and approve for games like Ingress and Pokémon Go, to small businesses. That way, a company like Starbucks or 7-Eleven can apply to have their locations loaded into Niantic’s Wayfarer database, which adds them to in-game maps as “Sponsored Locations.”

Niantic is also bringing its impressive AR occlusion technology (featured in the video below), which allows AR objects to interact more realistically with real-world ones. Buddy Adventure isn't the only feature mentioned in today's press release, since Niantic has also highlighted the Niantic Wayfarer program. This is a tool for high-level players so that they can submit new locations, photos, titles, and further information about the locations in Niantic's AR games.