Pokemon May Become a “Reality”

There are only a few that haven’t been caught up in the revival of one of our dearest childhood memories: Pokemon. With the advent of a recently developed smartphone game, Pokemon Go, people of all ages have ventured into the outside world, this time, their excuse being that they want to “catch ‘em all”. Pokemon Go has soared in popularity, in fact, in the US alone, it is closing in on the usage of Twitter. What’s more important is that it has managed to bring about changes that no other smartphone game app has ever done.

The premise of the game is quite simple. As most people already know, the game involves the capture of Pokemon (or Pocket Monsters) using a combination of ordinary technologies built into smartphones, including location tracking and cameras. In order to capture these Pokemon, players are required to travel to different landmarks and areas as this is the only way to experience all of what the game has to give.

Pokemon hunters have even begun to congregate in order to pursue a common goal: whether it be taking over a Gym (a certain landmark), or tracking a rare Pokemon. Boon Sheridan has seen this spectacle firsthand. Sheridan is a resident of Holyoke, Massachusetts whose home is a converted church and coincidentally, a Pokemon Gym. As such, Pokemon Go players who have reached Level 5 in-game gather around Sheridan’s home in order to train their Pokemon.

“I want to make sure I tell them [his neighbors], ‘Hey, I’m not a drug dealer,’” Sheridan says. “I know there are people pulling up in front of the house all the time, but trust me I have no say in this.” It’s not just churches and other places of interest that have been affected by the Pokemon flood either. Businesses in many areas have begun grasping the train. For example, a tea shop in San Francisco offered a “buy one tea, get one free” deal to Pokémon Go players. With businesses taking advantage of the Pokemon plague, it isn’t too long before a good part of our society has acknowledged Pokemon Go in some way.

Why has Pokemon Go become so revolutionary? The answer lies in augmented reality. Augmented reality, or A.R. for short, combines digital technology with the real world in an attempt to break through from the normal sort of gameplay. The idea of A.R. is to plaster digital imagery (such as a Pokemon) on a person’s view of the physical world using, what in this case is a smartphone. Pokemon Go players walk all around our world following their digital map to capture digital creatures, all the while experiencing some live-action.

Many technology gurus believed that augmented reality would take root in applications that were used for business purposes. One example might be the usage of A.R. to visualize building projects at a certain site. However, it seems like an old-school franchise managed to get to it first. Although the appearance of A.R. in such a state might downplay its true capacities, the marriage of the new technology with a loved franchise is what allowed the masses to get exposed to A.R..

"I've had people messaging me saying they haven't played video games since they were 10 or 11 years old playing the original Pokemon on the Game Boy trying out Pokemon Go," Patrick O'Rourke, a columnist for Canadian tech site MobileSyrup, told CBC News. "It's a watershed moment for AR, I'd say."

"Even if you don't exactly know what augmented reality is, you've heard the word before," he says. "Only three or four years ago, only early adopters or super-tech people would know what that is or engage with it directly. The time was right."

All that said this probably isn’t the first time people experienced attributed of A.R.. Snapchat, the popular mobile messaging application that uses pictures, has had bits of augmented reality for a while as well. Features like the face-swap and other filters add digital overlays to physical pictures in the same way Pokemon appear in front of you. What’s more to say, Pokemon Go isn’t the first game to use A.R.. Ingress, a smartphone game released in 2013 by Niantic Incorporated, has many similarities with Pokemon Go. However, unlike Pokemon Go, Ingress lacks a brand it can connect to and thus, did not attract too large of a crowd.

Most tech companies see A.R. as a stepping stone to virtual reality (V.R.). While A.R. is much more accessible than V.R., the latter allows the player to be much more involved. "A lot of tech companies have had a super-difficult time conveying what VR or AR means on the user's side," says Jeff Bakalar, a tech and games columnist for CNET. "[Pokemon Go] is that sort of gateway experience where the everyman can be like, 'Oh, I get it now.'”

That being said, we are humans. We tire of activities rather easily. It’s still too early to tell if Pokemon Go is just another fad or something that might go in the record books.

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