Pokémon Go is AR without the AR
The biggest augmented reality hit so far barely uses augmented reality. It's a map, built on years of data from another game.
Pokémon Go came out in the US a week ago. It isn’t officially out in Canada yet, and half of Vancouver is playing it anyway through US App Store accounts. On my walk to work this morning I counted eleven people standing at the same corner staring at their phones. Our office emptied at lunch on Friday because someone found a rare one two blocks away.
It’s being called the first big augmented reality hit. That’s true in a narrow sense: when you find a Pokémon, the camera view can show it standing on the sidewalk in front of you. But almost everyone I know turns that off after a day, because it drains the battery and makes it harder to throw the ball. The camera overlay isn’t what’s making the game work.
What makes it work is the map. The game world is the real world. PokéStops and gyms are real places, like churches, murals, statues and odd little plaques you’ve walked past for years without reading. That list of places didn’t come from nowhere. Niantic built Ingress, an earlier location game, on the same idea, and Ingress players spent years submitting and verifying “portals” all over the world. Pokémon Go launched on top of that database. Niantic had a map of the interesting places in the world, curated by players, before Pokémon Go existed.
So the augmented part is the game layer on the map, much more than the graphics on the camera feed. The real world becomes the level design, and your body moving through it is the controller. I find that more interesting than any headset demo I’ve seen, because it works on the phone people already have and the thing it augments is how they move through their own city.
The obvious caveats: the servers are falling over, the battery drain is brutal, and nobody knows if people will still play in September. My guess is the numbers drop a lot, the way they do for every viral game, but the idea stays. Anyone building AR should notice that the hardest and most valuable asset here isn’t rendering. It’s a model of the physical world with meaning attached to places.