
A Year After ‘Pokémon Go,’ Where Are the Augmented-Reality Hits? - prostoalex
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-year-after-pokemon-go-where-are-the-augmented-reality-hits-1499284437
======
habosa
It's interesting that almost all of the comments here assume that the 'AR' in
Pokemon Go was showing the Pokemon character in the camera viewfinder during
the catching sequence.

Is it not also AR to have many invisible creatures, gyms, and resources placed
in the real world? I don't think there needs to be a visual component at all
for it to be AR. When I used to play the game my reality was augmented because
everywhere I went I thought "I wonder what Pokemon are around" and would check
the app.

A seamless visual integration would be nice (I want to see some Pokemon battle
in my living room) but even just the Ingress-style map integration is AR in my
opinion.

~~~
NamTaf
My only contention with this is that those features don't _really_ take
influence from the real world in any more than a superficial sense. The
biggest influence is geography of spawns. I don't mean the regional pokemon
aspect, rather the feature that water-based ones spawn closer to water (ie:
next to a river). I can agree that's AR.

On the other hand, gyms are just arbitrarily tied to landmarks purely by
location. There's no actual interaction with the landmark. Excepting spawn
variance, you could replace the entire pokemon map with a fake world and
absolutely nothing would change from a gameplay point of view.

In that sense, I struggle to call that AR there's no actual augmentation to
the reality. The pokemon, gyms, PoI, etc. do not influence or take influence
from the landscape around them. You don't go to actual hospitals to heal your
pokemon. Gyms don't change in any way whatsoever based on where they're placed
- for example, battling in a gym in the middle of a park doesn't involve
fighting in an open field with no obstacles, vs a gym in a CBD letting the
buildings, cars, etc. play a role in the battle.

It really boils down to the subjective aspect of what AR/VR/etc. constitutes.
For me, there needs to be some influence from the real world to the AR. With
PoGo, there's really not beyond the most superficial listed above. In that
sense, it's no more AR than an achievement/reward-based, social-network style
step counter where you compete with your friends and the public for the amount
you walk. It simply uses the GPS to measure distance - beyond that, the real
world plays no role.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> those features don't really take influence from the real world in any more
> than a superficial sense. The biggest influence is geography of spawns. I
> don't mean the regional pokemon aspect, rather the feature that water-based
> ones spawn closer to water (ie: next to a river).

Is that actually a feature of Pokemon Go? I'd heard of this, but what I heard
was specifically that it was a myth.

~~~
NamTaf
Water-based pokemon like magikarp, slowpoke, dratini, etc. spawn at the edges
of rivers far more than they do even 500m - 1km away. I work in an office next
to a river and it is definitely true.

I suspect the old rumours of 'porygon is most likely found near libraries,
etc.' is myth, but this definitely holds.

------
yoodenvranx
As someone who played a lot of Ingress: I _really_ wish a competent company
would enter the AR market!

Yes, Niantic had success with Ingress amd PoGo but literally everything they
ever did they did in the most stupid and brain-dead way.

I would still play Ingress today but after 3 years I am beyond frustrated with
that company and lost any drive to invest any more time and energy.

What makes me sad is the fact that Ingress still has so much untapped
potential but at the same time I know that Niantic is unable to do anything
with that potential.

~~~
will_pseudonym
And the same could be said of PoGo.

~~~
mort96
Every since the last patch there has been a bug where if person A of one team
takes down a gym and puts in a pokemon, person B of the same team has to wait
half an hour before they can put in their pokemon, getting a "The gym is under
attack!" error message before those ~30 minutes. The one core gameplay
feature, taking down gyms together with one or more friends, has been broken
for almost two weeks. The incompetence is staggering.

There are workarounds (everyone have to insert their pokemon at the exact same
time), but that's besides the point.

~~~
croon
I agree that's very annoying, but it's:

A) Only 5 or 10 minutes, definitely not 30

B) If both/all team members are present in the fight, they all have "claim" to
the gym afterwards, and this works. I've tested both cases.

~~~
mort96
I don't know about A, I just know it's far too long to just hang around and
wait, but regarding B: I'm certain that when my brother and I have taken over
a gym together, both present in the fight, and one have put in a pokemon
before the other, the other can't insert a pokemon because "The gym is under
attack".

~~~
croon
Ok, I specifically tested this with my wife the other day, and it worked. But
the game has seen a fair share of bugs, so I can't say I'm surprised.

------
greenscale
I've played Pokémon Go quite a bit since it released, and I turned off AR mode
within the first few weeks of playing. It's just a gimmick, and it gets old
pretty fast, kinda like the '3D movies' fad.

~~~
vivekd
I still enjoy 3d movies.

~~~
nsxwolf
In theaters, with the right treatment and the right film, 3D can be totally
awesome.

I haven't heard a lot of people talk about the 3D in Rogue One, but I'm very
glad I saw it that way.

------
aresant
Where are the hits?

\- AR powers the world's #1 Photo App (#3 most popular app overall) in
Snapchat's filters.

\- AR is getting its first commercially polished, OS level set of libraries in
the next release from the world's most valuable consumer electronics company
in iOS 11.

\- AR's killer form factor - wearable glasses - is being furiously developed
by Google, Apple, SNAP, MSFT, etc, etc and it's going to be weird and fucking
wonderful when AR has a truly suitable foundation to build on.

So where are the hits?

All around us, right in front of us.

~~~
sillysaurus3
_\- AR 's killer form factor - wearable glasses_

Unlikely. I've elaborated on this in the past.

Basically: You cannot make things dark. You can't use LCD type technology to
block part of the lenses for the same reason you can't see scratches on your
lenses: you're not focused on your lenses! You're focused in the distance.
That means the ideal of having crisp, readable text overlays is mostly a
fantasy. You can prove this yourself: get a piece of tape, write some text on
it, and put it over your lenses. You can't read the text. You can even use
clear tape to simulate what a real overlay would look like.

The second problem is power. Oculus makes sense because you're tethered to a
high-end workhorse. When you're using glasses, you have neither a video card
nor a huge source of power at your disposal. That means battery technology
would need to improve by a massive amount just to make the glasses not die
within hours.

The third issue is target recognition. The real world is instant. That means
any overlay you use would need to attain 90FPS to appear seamless. If you're
going to do the most basic thing with an AR device -- drawing an arrow on the
ground, indicating where to walk, a'la Google Maps -- you'll need to recognize
the ground + render the overlay within 11 milliseconds. This _might_ work for
a ground-based overlay, since you can assume it's a flat plane in a big city,
as long as your gyroscope is accurate enough. But where would you even stick a
gyroscope with that kind of precision inside a glasses form factor?

The best form factor for this would probably be some kind of "bandana", where
the meat of the device sits on the back of your head. That'd look dorky and
it'd be uncomfortable, but you might be able to pull it off.

The only way this might work is if you use LCD tech to dim the entirety of
both lenses enough to then project light on top of them. But again, your
focusing out in the distance, so trying to show anything readable (text
messages) seems kind of a fantasy.

Here's proof: Pull out your phone and hold it up to your eye where lenses of
glasses would normally be. I'm not sure if you could even render it in a way
that would account for the focus blur.

~~~
jaggederest
You realize that the entire thesis of your statements are given the lie by the
fact that Google Cardboard exists, right? It's literally holding the phone up
to your face, and using the camera to take photos out the side. I've used it
to filter reality

"AR" doesn't mean "projecting clear text onto the real world". It means
retransmitting the real world from a camera onto an LCD with things added.

We literally already have the technology built into phones. You add some
lenses and a battery pack and you're good.

~~~
ekianjo
That's hardly going to comfortable to keep your eyes focused on short distance
for a long period of time. That's the problem with "holding the phone up to
your face".

~~~
jaggederest
Your eyes are not focused on a short distance. The whole point is that the
lenses make it so that your eyes focus to infinity while the device is very
close.

------
rabboRubble
I come from a country family with lots of family. I broke a different way, and
I'm citified. They hunt. I don't.

After playing Pokémon Go for a while, I finally realized that the act of
playing PMG is like hunting & stalking for deer/elk/whatever, but without
needing a weapon, ammo, training, safety gear, or bloodshed.

So after factoring in all the extra exercise, a win for the city girl :-)

I think to replicate PMG's success, the next game has to tickle that same
hunter driver. What's the new new thing that people want to hunt and track
down? If we identify this, we will have the next winning AR game.

------
oDot
Pokemon Go is a hit because of Pokemon and location tracking, not AR

~~~
mjevans
I say 'was'. The more they try to make it a pointless grind-numbing micro-
battle game over an actual hunt for completion (and pulling me towards places
I /don't/ already go) game the less I want to play.

I think they'd have to either add a tracking over time feature or restore the
radar that used to exist for me to get back in to it.

~~~
bsamuels
the "radar" is back. instead of using the old 1-3 steps system to gauge
distance, it says which pokestop the pokemon is closest to

------
jerf
One could argue it wasn't "augmented reality" at all. I doubt cell phones have
the power to take their camera feed in, do actual computer vision to analyze
the (arbitrary) world [1], and then overlay anything with any interesting
intelligence at all. (Even if you can scrape together the specs to say that
high end phones might be able to do nontrivial work, I wouldn't be surprised
you hit problems like internal hardware bandwidths and such. Even before we
discuss battery, which Pokemon Go certainly chewed down pretty well even
without complex analysis.) Pokemon Go was just a character laid over the
camera with no intelligence.

[1]: I have to qualify this because the 3DS can do some things with certain
prepared cards, and cell phones nowadays outclass the 3DS quite handily. But
doing any sort of analysis without such hints, which certainly have not taken
off, is way harder.
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3ds+augmented+r...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3ds+augmented+reality+cards)

~~~
Animats
_I doubt cell phones have the power to take their camera feed in, do actual
computer vision to analyze the (arbitrary) world [1], and then overlay
anything with any interesting intelligence at all._

Word Lens.

~~~
jerf
A decent counterexample, but that's still not analysing the environment for
geometry, it is doing OCR and very simple replacement.

And I found it to work less well in practice than the demos showed. Though
working at all is impressive.

------
sotojuan
The AR of Pokémon GO is the same as the 3D of the 3DS - it was a big part of
the promotional material and hype for it but a year after release everyone has
it turned off.

~~~
bm5k
I still play my 3ds almost exclusively with 3D on. My uncorrected vision is
bad enough that I have to turn it off if I'm not wearing my glasses.

However the AR of pokémon go actually makes the game _harder_ IMO, so it's
only on in the rare instances I feel the need to take an in-game photo.

Also, pokego is a significant battery drain on my primary device. I feel like
leaving the camera on all the time would just kill the battery faster. OTOH I
don't really care if the 3d effect kills my 3ds faster. My gaming sessions
aren't as mission critical as my phone battery.

~~~
voltagex_
Pokemon Go was the first time I saw "most" people walking around with an
external battery for their phones. I was hoping it'd _really_ take off and
phone manufacturers might finally put decent sized batteries in flagship
phones.

------
fiatjaf
Instagram glasses floating around the person and other shitty stuff are more
AR than Pokémon.

------
paul7986
Never use a measuring tape again...
[http://armeasure.com/](http://armeasure.com/)

Game changing apps like the one above (at least it is to me) are coming to the
iPhone 8. Thanks in part to Apple's AR Kit and ingenious developers.

~~~
transitorykris
Small correction, ARKit works on as little as iPhone 6s with reasonable
accuracy.

------
extra88
Somewhat relevant, here's the researcher who made the Super Marios Bros. AR
talking about what went into making it. The title references Unity3D but he
spends very little time on the game engine. To me, the more interesting parts
are about the challenges of using the Hololens outdoors over a relatively
large area.

[https://youtu.be/Rcw7nB7_Los?t=732](https://youtu.be/Rcw7nB7_Los?t=732)

original video: Super Mario Bros Recreated as Life Size Augmented Reality Game
[https://youtu.be/QN95nNDtxjo](https://youtu.be/QN95nNDtxjo)

------
gozur88
I think industrial uses of AR will be bigger than games. Showing people where
to find parts, bringing up additional data, comparing what you see with what
you're supposed to be seeing... all that would be highly useful.

------
beezischillin
Bringing up Pokemon GO and the AR games that didn't happen in this time and
point in history is a bit weird - Apple's announcement kinda prepares to bring
AR to the mainstream by giving everyone with their hardware a competent,
stable platform for that, coming this September. When the market is provided
for the taking and a platform behind it, in my opinion, developers will flock
to create just those applications.

But, I mean, a year from now? Maybe if adoption doesn't pick up by then let's
ask the same question and see what conclusions we can draw.

------
SurrealSoul
AR has been around for quite a while, but it won't kick off like VR will. I
tried a few Hololens 'experiences' and the only thing I remotely enjoyed was
leaving basically a notepad window on my cube wall. The "Games" really don't
break the immersion levels like VR does. If I saw a bird fly at me in AR, I
wouldn't flinch, but seeing a bird fly at my in VR may cause me head to weave
a bit.

~~~
Impossible
A rare internet comment that is the inverse of the now, cliche "VR is niche
and AR will be (or is... if you consider pokemon go AR) mainstream" AR needs
to get a lot better before its immersive, and there might be limits to
displays that make true hard AR impossible or unlikely. I think most of the
mainstream use cases that people imagine for AR are pretty basic, ie text and
icon overlays over video, so immersion isn't viewed as an important aspect. In
the context of games I think it's hard to design a good AR game because you
don't have control over the environment the player is in. It does open up a
lot of fun location based ideas though. I also kind of like the idea of hybrid
physical digital games although those will always be niche due to costs and
setup friction.

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davidmurdoch
Totally self-promoting here... But I'm making a new location-based game right
now called Terra Mango. Instead of some buildings being pokestops or gyms,
every building in the real world is intractable.

We're not using the camera for AR at all though. It's only AR because where
you are in the real world determines what you can interact with in the game.

------
nippples
AR won't be worthwhile until:

1) It has a window to the AR larger than a wallet

2) It doesn't hog one of my hands for holding said window into the AR

3) Actually takes into consideration the the environment it's supposed to
augment

Decent AR technology will probably be branched from current VR technologies,
rather than mobile phones.

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jeremynixon
Pass the paywall: [https://t.co/z5MeavGpkg](https://t.co/z5MeavGpkg)

~~~
kronos29296
How did you do that?

------
weego
Where were the genuine World of Warcraft alternatives a few years later?
Sometimes a big hit is just a big hit in itself and not a genre creator.

~~~
WillPostForFood
If you swap Everquest or Ultima Online for Warcraft in your question, then you
have your hits that the were genre creators, and the alternatives that arrived
a few years later (Warcraft, Eve Online, Club Penguin, Guild Wars, D&D Online,
etc...)

Or if you want to focus on Warcraft as the big hit that popularized the genre,
then we can see that the secondary MMOs of today are over 10x size of the
biggest MMO pre-Warcraft (Everquest peaked at around 600k subscriber, Elder
Scrolls Online has over 8 million). No one game has been as big as WoW, but it
did grow the overall market massively.

------
bitwize
AR is waiting for Apple to truly invent it.

------
hsod
I'd love a more passive version of Pokemon Go. I very quickly got tired of
walking around with my face buried in my phone, or having to leave it open and
unlocked when walking to hatch eggs.

I'd love an AR game which gathered your real-life location data but allowed
you to do the actual playing when you're back at home.

~~~
kagamine
Having to keep the phone unlocked while walking is a killer, the battery dies
pretty fast. How is that I can go for a run and fitness apps can track me via
geo-location, serving notifications as I go, but PG can't?

~~~
dEnigma
Indeed, I always try to keep it in energy saving mode by having it bottom side
up in my pocket. But when I want to listen to music too, I have to orient my
phone the other way because of the headphone jack, which causes the screen to
stay on. Since my smartphone is a few years old, the battery doesn't last very
long that way. Quite annoying.

