AR’s watershed moment

TECHLIFE’S EDITOR RECKONS THAT EVEN IF IT’S NOT YOUR CUP OF TEA, YOU SHOULDN’T HATE ON POKÉMON GO — IT’S LIKELY THE BEGINNING OF TECH’S NEXT BIG FRONTIER.

BY THIS POINT, I’m pretty sure that if you’re not one of the millions of people playing the game, you’re probably sick to death of hearing about Pokémon GO. Bear with me, though, because there are some good reasons to be forgiving of the game and everything that’s come with it — not least of which is the fact that this is augmented reality’s watershed moment.

Within a day of its release, it was fairly clear that Pokémon GO was going to be big. And within a week, it had added a staggering 53% increase to Nintendo’s share price, equating to over US$15 billion dollars to the company’s market value. A week and a half in and it’s already got more users than Twitter, and the people who’re playing it spend more time with it than even Facebook.

Pokémon’s core mechanics are ttingly-suited to augmented reality (AR) translation. In the traditional games, you control a character who runs around an anime world collecting mini monsters and battling other characters and their collections. e beauty of this AR version is that it takes that gameplay and just puts it directly in the real world, meaning players are forced to literally run around visiting real-world locations to keep growing their collection.

And honestly, there’s just something heartwarming about the fact that, on a Saturday night, I can look out at the park opposite my at and see small groups of twenty- and thirty-somethings gleefully running around, yelling at each other as they peer through their phone’s cameras at imaginary creatures. Even if you can’t understand it, you’ve got to admit that anything that gets people outside and moving around has to be a good thing.

So why is the game so big? In a word, it is all about the Pokémon. ere are many, many spin-o s and adaptations to the core games — so many that a widely-repeated adage among fans is that you can ‘just add Pokémon’ if you want to turn your average game into a smash hit. at certainly seems to have worked in developer Niantic’s case — there’s a lot of the company’s previous game Ingress apparent in

Pokémon GO, with both e ectively built on top of Google Maps and sharing many of the same core mapping-oriented features. Ingress was successful — it’s got a cult following in Australia — but nowhere near the level of this new game.

And in a wider sense, what Niantic’s new creation has done is opened up a huge audience’s eyes to the possibilities of augmented reality. Other companies are going to be looking at their own portfolios and seeing what can be adapted to t the AR mould. While that might mean that, in the near term, we just see a lot of GO clones, in the years to come, it’ll be turned to all sorts of unexpected, interesting and even ( gasp) practical purposes.

It’s not o en we see a tech phenomenon take o so rapidly; but despite whether or not

Pokémon GO can sustain that level of interest over the long term, the tech world will certainly never be the same.