EDITOR’S NOTE: You may have noticed people of all ages walking up and down the streets, in Barrhead, maybe in front of popular stores and other businesses, all the while staring at their phones. Have you wondered why? This week, the Barrhead Leader is taking a closer look at the phenomenon behind Pokemon Go — what ‘augmented reality’ means and why there is such a draw to smartphone games like it. In a future article, we will be speaking with our local RCMP detachment about safety, and to the local community businesses identified by the game as PokeCentres, PokeGyms, and other hotspots.
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A Japan-based company’s release of mobile-phone game app Pokemon Go on July 17, a game already downloaded 21 million times in North America alone, marks the second time ‘augmented reality’ software has been ascribed to gaming, Barrhead Library technician Kyle Hughes said, adding this application is only the most recent development of a piece of software that has been around for some time.
Augmented Reality (AR) games such as Pokemon Go, as well as Ingress (released December 2014), which work via a downloaded app on your smartphone, are creating a stir across the country due to the paired elements of game-play, socialization and exercise, he said.
Heads-Up-Displays (HUD) that feature in the head gear of the military, fire department, and other services, can be associated with AR, Hughes said, along with the short-lived Google Glass, and – believe it or not, self-driving vehicles, because of the fact that the output is computer-controlled, while drones on the other hand require a human-element in many aspects, so they are technically different.
“We’ve been reading about augmented reality for decades in science fiction, but HUDs were the first real example of a computer-controlled system having an impact on the real world,” he said.
A blog release by Niantic’s John Hanke, on July 6, stated that Pokemon Go was the next evolution of Real World Gaming – defined as ‘an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and uses transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players’ actions or ideas‘, and said the company’s previous release – Ingress, another ‘real world’ gaming experience, had shown them the potential player-base.
“How augmented reality works is in real time, the software adds or supplements through sounds, video, graphics and GPS through a computer-controlled device,” Hughes said, adding devices like TomToms and applications such as Google Maps are examples of AR systems not associated with the gaming aspects of Ingress or Pokemon Go.
“Google Glass, was something of the ‘next level’ in augmented reality, utilizing a visual overlay of google maps through the glasses,” he said. “Pokemon Go uses a mix of two types of AR. It has a google maps overlay that tracks your location in the world – certain places are designated as Pokemon Centres and Pokemon Gyms, others are hotspots – places like the Flower Shoppe and the Back Forty store, and then when you’ve encountered one of the ‘wild’ pokemon, the app transitions into utilizing your phone’s camera-system and overlays a pokemon onto your screen in real time pointing at wherever you are looking.”
Self-driving cars such as the Google Map vehicles, are another example of AR, and Hughes said it is unfortunate, in his opinion, that society may never see one commercially available.
“The problem is with insurance, in the event of an accident – that’s a bureaucratic nightmare, and it’s also a question of what that technology implies,” he said. “Self-driving cars are the most efficient things for driving that we’ve ever created — computers can think faster and impartially, and we have developed them to the point of deductive reasoning. The difference between human and computer-controlled vehicles, is in the number of options available in the event of an accident situation. Computers will weigh the choices, but most people, despite having good intentions, do not want to die and will choose their own survival over that of others.”
Hughes said Pokemon Go and Ingress represent the fun aspects of augmented reality, but said the real world applications for the technology behind them is, in his opinion, astronomical.
“It is unfortunate that Google Glass failed the way it did, and part of that, I think, was due to privacy concerns related to Google’s facial-recognition software,” he said, adding people can reverse search images through Google and find out anything they want to about others — simply by lifting a person’s face from an image.
“When Google Glass was first unveiled, American television show America’s Most Wanted indicated they might want to put their list of criminals through the software, but it became a huge controversial thing and never went anywhere,” he added.
Hughes admitted he has tried Pokemon Go, and has debated running programs through the library such as a walking club, but nothing has been decided.
“Pokemon Go’s popularity is unlike anything else,” he said. “I’ve no idea how this is going to turn out. World of Warcraft [multi-player game created by US-Company Blizzard Entertainment] had a staff of 7,000 to deal with customer service issues related to their player-base of 12 million. Go deals with hundreds of millions of connections out of a single server. Niantic is going to have to make some kind of automated service department, otherwise it is going to fail.”
