A Year After 'Pokemon Go', Where Are the Augmented-Reality Hits? (theaustralian.com.au) 105
A year after "Pokemon Go" prompted throngs of people to scour parks and streets for monsters visible only through smartphones, hit games made with augmented reality are rarer than a Snorlax. From a report: In fact, analysts say, the monster-hunting blockbuster drove only a brief spike in games using the nascent technology, which blends digital images with a person's view of the real world. That is surprising, considering the ubiquity of screenshots showing Pokemon invading players' work desks, kitchen counters and other locations of everyday life. "Pokemon Go" reached $1 billion in revenue globally just seven months after its release last July -- faster than any other mobile game, including Activision Blizzard's "Candy Crush Saga," according to App Annie. There are thousands of augmented-reality games among the millions of apps in the Apple and Alphabet stores. None, though, has come close to the success of "Pokemon Go." There are several reasons why, industry observers say. One is that the allure of "Pokemon Go" wasn't primarily its augmented reality. While the game's digital monsters materialise as if in the real world, they don't interact with it. A Snorlax might appear next to a tree, but the catlike creature won't peek from behind it. Many players who took up hunting the monsters ended up turning off the augmented-reality feature.
Hit Mobile games are rarer than a MewTwo (Score:2)
Activision Blizzard's "Candy Crush Saga" (Score:2)
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I don't think it is likely. How much crossover is there between Activision and Blizzard? None that I know of. In any case I don't think Blizzard wants King's reputation.
Novelty Feature (Score:1)
Augmented reality is a novelty feature in Pokemon Go. Any serious player switches the AR off because it just makes it more difficult to catch the Pokemon and burns more battery.
Simple reason (Score:3)
The AR on Pokémon Go makes it harder to play so it gets turned off. I imagine the other AR games suffer similar issues.
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They shut if off for my phone. I simply don't care enough to unroot my phone and reinstall factory crap OS.
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But I'm not sure the market won't be more suited to utility than gaming. I can imagine lots of cool things, but it may all just wind up being more novelty.
Could be useful for things like design or architecture, where you could overlay plans, models, measurements, etc where you plan to build/place something. It could be very useful while driving by highlighting obstacles/pedestrians or overlaying routes (like turning the streets on the route you need to take yellow instead of HUDs showing distance/upcoming turns). If it gets good enough I could see the military all over it: imagine a system similar to the proposed Land Warrior system-individual soldiers coul
Re: Simple reason (Score:2)
Ghost Busters GO (Score:5, Interesting)
Where is it. It's the natural fit for this technology but no one is ever going to make it.
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Not AR (Score:2, Troll)
Simple, that wasn't AR. It was a Pokémon superimposed on a video. Did the Pokémon move in relation to objects in the scene? No. Could you circle around the Pokémon? No.
True AR is coming this fall in iOS 11 and those demos are actually impressive.
Ok, here are pics (Score:1)
Check out this twitter feed [twitter.com] for some impressive ARKit examples.
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Those all look awful and pointless. They're still nothing beyond what the Nintendo 3DS did with AR cards - shitty little gimmicks.
Who keeps hyping up AR? Every implementation we've seen has been a flop or outright scam. There are almost no use cases for it, and the few genuine use cases that do exists are better served with glasses or a head mounted display. And we all know how the general public liked wearing glasses to watch 3D movies.
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You don't find measurement to be a good use case? That actually looked pretty solid. And seeing a rocket land in 3D, while not useful, is cool and educational...
I'll admit I find gaming for hand-held AR questionable, but I think there are a lot of practical and especially good educational uses for the technology now that it can interact with what is really around you properly.
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Simple, that wasn't AR. It was a Pokemon superimposed on a video. Did the Pokemon move in relation to objects in the scene? No. Could you circle around the Pokemon? No.
True AR is coming this fall in iOS 11 and those demos are actually impressive.
There's already a bunch of AR out there. Much of it is via planar target tracking or object trackings. Apple's gone and built (well, bought) a decent SLAM system of some sort with good IMU integration and plane determination like the old Ninja on a Plane demo out of
My house is a fucking gym. (Score:1)
We might move.
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You don't understand Pokemon Go or AR (Score:5, Insightful)
I played Pokemon Go for a while after it first came out because I wanted to understand it.
The main thing to know is : Pokemon go IS NOT AN AR APP.
It's merely an image of a pokemon that is overlaid on live video, where the image moves somewhat in accordance with rotation of the phone. What it does NOT do is track with real world objects at all well or even try to make any sense of where the pokemon will be placed. What MOST PG players did after a short time was turn off the video so the pokemon would not shift with device rotation... so then it wasn't even FauxAR. It wasn't the AR aspect that made PokemonGo popular at all, even though it seemed like it at first from the outside - it was really traditional game mechanics that made it work, if anything the hook was the tie to real-world physical locations.
What makes an AR app AR, is that it truly augments reality with realistic presence in the scene.
The reason you haven't seen many such apps is because doing a good job of that has been tricky - or it was until ARKit [slashdot.org] was delivered by Apple...
Expect an absolute FLOOD of AR games coming with iOS 11. Literally tens of thousands, not even joking. As you can imagine, it's going to be rough to find something of quality...
Working link to ARKit examples (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the working link [twitter.com] to see some real-world ARKit examples that people have been working on.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Stop spamming this shit. It's nothing more than the dancing hotdog filter in SnapChat.
Spamming what? (Score:2)
Or are you incapable of seeing I used two different links in two different posts - hardly spamming...
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Posting twice is spamming now?
Oh wait, no.
Not everyone is incapable of perceiving fun as you are. People can look at the videos in the links and decide for themselves if they think the tech is interesting - your position is clear but I'm not posting for you or a small cabal of equally grumpy OffMyLawners, I'm posting for everyone.
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Yes, it is, when what you're posting is nothing of substance. The fucking Twitter account with examples has about 6 posts total and only a couple of actual examples, none of which are any better or more useful than what was done a decade ago.
It's a snoooooooooooooooooze fest that only the dumbest of the dumb would get excited about.
I bet you were hyped up for HoloLens and Magic Leap and whatever else.
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Meta it.
A multiplayer game where you score points by getting other players to walk in front of busses, into canals, over cliffs etc.
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That would especially be cool if it was iOS only.
Something more interesting than standing in line at the Apple store once a year.
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Supports multiple planes... (Score:2)
ARKit lets you know where planes are, including the boundaries... however I am pretty sure it is only horizontal planes. They may have added in other mechanisms to try and detect side obstacles, or you could detect walls by finding out where the lowest horizontal plane ends...
It definitely has limitations but it has a lot of things it makes easy:
(1) matching object lighting with room lighting
(2) Objects auto-scaled for environment
(3) Aformentioned plane detection
(4) Keeping track of where you are in the sp
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The reason you haven't seen many such apps is because doing a good job of that has been tricky - or it was until ARKit was delivered by Apple...
Expect an absolute FLOOD of AR games coming with iOS 11. Literally tens of thousands, not even joking. As you can imagine, it's going to be rough to find something of quality...
More or less. Planar target AR existed before and there are still companies out there doing it. The barrier to entry was always higher than owning an iPhone, a mac and paying for a dev licens
Hype (Score:2)
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I wouldn't buy an AI TV until AI TV apps apps apps are available.
Pokemon Go was a unicorn (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a nostalgic fad. The game in question sucked.
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Yes, it was a unicorn. Which precisely is why others haven't tried to piggyback off it's success. As everyone knows - You Never play Leapfrog with a Unicorn.
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Concerned parents and groups never raised such "issues". Such features were never implemented or even announced. Further, Niantic makes the game, not Nintendo or The Pokemon Company. They merely licensed the right to make the game to Niantic, which is an offshoot of Google. Pokemon Go is little more than a skin of Ingress.
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It was a nostalgic fad.
One that still has 5million daily users.
The game in question sucked.
Oh you played it for the game? You're doing it wrong. Should have gone out to meet people, join teams, etc.
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I can think of better ways to go out, meet people, join teams, etc.
Maybe not to you, but I would assume to the majority of folks this is the case.
User count also doesn't determine if something is a nostalgic fad, don't try to justify this product please. It's Pokemon. Of course it's a fucking fad. I could put my shit in a Pokeball and sell it for $1000 to some kid telling them it's a Grimer.
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I can think of better ways to go out, meet people, join teams, etc.
Maybe not to you, but I would assume to the majority of folks this is the case.
There is no "better" way. There are only multiple ways. It doesn't matter if this is joining a soccer game, drinking at a bar, sitting around in a cafe with a book club, or playing a game that brings people into an area. The end result if done right is the same: An expanding network of friends, hell due to the localisation of pokemon go as a game that generally limits you to walking distance of the place you spend most of your time the people you join teams with an socialise with have a key benefit over mos
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But insulting the people who actively find the game fun and insulting a long term franchise as a fad really just says more about you than it does about Pokemon or its players.
I called it a fad. If that insults you, get help. I played Pokemon as a kid too, you know. I don't hate it.
Why are you trying to justify a product to someone who clearly wants none of it?
Half my comment was meant to be in bad taste with an obviously overblown statement, and you attacked it seriously. You must be trolling.
What? (Score:2)
No love for Garfield Go? http://www.garfieldgo.com/ [garfieldgo.com]
I'm kidding of course, horrible clone.
The AR element in Pokemon Go wasn't more than novelty, and you can easily play the game without it... what made the game popular was the GPS functionality and the franchise name of course.
It is the whole problem with AR and VR. We are still missing a full step to making both convenient enough to be used without caveats. For AR, think of it integrated in regular glass frames. For VR it also needs to be some sort of regul
AR? What AR? (Score:1)
The augmented reality part of Pokemon Go wasn't the draw. It was a gimick that made for amusing marketing, but as mentioned in TFS, most people turned that off.
The real draw of PokeGo was taking an existing fan base, and bringing that game into the real world. In Pokemon games, you play a character who travels around catching these little monsters. PoGo allowed you to step into those shoes and literally be the main character. You walk around and capture monsters, seeing a real life tree in the background is
Toolkits (Score:1)
Just waiting for a DnD AR game (Score:5, Insightful)
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People have tried that, doesn't work. The only reason Pokemon Go had a bit of a fad is because the massive advertising campaign, but even so, you don't see the majority of people still running for Pokemon everywhere.
Augmented Reality?! (Score:2)
Pokemon Go was augmented reality in the same way that games on the Virtual Boy were virtual reality.
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No one used it. (Score:2)
That is surprising, considering the ubiquity of screenshots showing Pokemon invading players' work desks, kitchen counters and other locations of everyday life.
Pretty much all those screenshots were taken on the first day, then people found out how to turn that shit off and that the game is actually easier when you don't need to hold your smartphone in a specific way to aim at a pokemon.
If anything Pokemon Go showed how little people actually cared to participate in the augmented part.
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"While the game's digital monsters materialise as if in the real world, they don't interact with it. A Snorlax might appear next to a tree, but the catlike creature won't peek from behind it."
Its almost as if the creatures weren't real!
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Its almost as if the creatures weren't real!
It's like reality but augmented.
Not the AR part (Score:1)
It wasn't the AR that people liked, as most said, people just turned it off. It was the location based part, where you can drive around or walk and keep finding Pokemon, and Poke Stops and Gyms. Its just kinda fun to pull it out and play anywhere you are.
I'm sure there will be more coming soon, RPG like.
Re:Not the AR part - it was the scavenger hunt! (Score:2)
Essentially it GO made for a global scavenger hunt. Those things are cool.
The next step, I'd think, would be an app where you can publish your own waypoints to a server for private or public groups to utilize, and perhaps add varying degrees of difficulty (like the range at which items show up), items that give up clues to the location of the next one, perhaps tie scores to real world rewards at an after-game party.
You could also make a rally app... pretty much anything location-based people have ever done
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It can work (Score:1)
Pokemon GO is about being social in my area... (Score:3)
In my Small-City (~20,000), Pokemon GO injected a lot of life into those who avoid the Church/Bar social-focus of the past... since-forever.
Last year, you could see 8-year-olds out with their parents at 2AM and strike up a (really freaking cool) conversation with a 50+ OrbitalATK Engineer a few minutes later and have a group of 30+ people ignoring Pokemon and learning about Outer Space before departing to catch a Pikachu.
Nothing has ever achieved such an indelible mark in my locale. After Niantic decided to conduct matters in a better manner, this has only increased.
They want it played in a walled garden (Score:2)
Since I try to control my phone (Android running Cyanogenmod), they didn't want my business, making it impossible to play even with sideloading.
Didn't feel like jumping through hoops to hide root.
Their loss is greater than mine.