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A Year After 'Pokemon Go', Where Are the Augmented-Reality Hits? (theaustralian.com.au)
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.
Only a few top games every make any money to speak of. What's propping the mobile marketplace up is the high exchange rate for certain currencies make it possible for folks in Vietnam, China, East Europe, etc to sell apps to Americans, Canadians and parts of Europe and make a decent living. Then there's a few big hits that go viral like Angry Birds and that one Kardashian app. Other than that everybody loses money.
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I had no clue that Activision Blizzard was sucking on the "Candy Crush Saga" lollipop. Is that for the revenue stream and/or will there be a "Warcraft/StarCraft/Diablo Crush Saga" app in the future?
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.
The AR on Pokémon Go makes it harder to play so it gets turned off. I imagine the other AR games suffer similar issues.
Where is it. It's the natural fit for this technology but no one is ever going to make it.
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.
We might move.
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 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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
AR and VR are complete hype. No consumer is asking for them. Like 3DTV it will soon be forgotten. Of course, the industry now is onto its next hype cycle: "AI".
It was a nostalgic fad. The game in question sucked.
I tend to rant.
Here's the working link to see some real-world ARKit examples that people have been working on.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No love for Garfield Go? http://www.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 regular glasses, not something that is closer to a helmet.
If we're talking about AR in smartphones, I don't think it'll ever have a directly related explosion in popularity anytime soon. You need to be constantly pointing out your camera at stuff, and this can become extremely inconvenient at times. Perhaps games with few bursts of this that have a very complex image recognition algorithm to identify objects and whatnot, but it'll still be a game that might initially explode in popularity due to novelty, but will be hard to manage a huge following for a long time.
We'll see where this goes. It's hard to imagine huge popularity because evolution of tech is dependant on overcoming some pretty big obstacles... battery is one that comes to mind. We're getting close to flexible transparent OLED displays. And perhaps wireless data high speed and low latency transmission is right around the corner too.
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 superfluous at best.
If another game wants to ride the PoGo coat tails, that's the angle to take. Find an existing game or rule set, and let the player step into the role.
An obvious option would be anything in the fantasy genre (DnD, Tolkien, Warcraft, etc.). The random Poké spawns are enemies to grind and level up, pokestops are now mini boss fights, and gyms are raid bosses.
Grab a few friends, party up, and head down to the local Starbucks to defeat the dragon.
I think one of the main reasons AR hasn't seen too much traction is that there aren't a lot of development kits for AR that make it easy to build environments on. I would like to think that when Apple releases AR kit and Google releases further iterations of its own Unity AR engines that AR will become more pervasive. But right now making a game like that would require quit a bit of technical expertise that goes beyond the game mechanics itself. I also agree with the sentiment that the screen on a phone is a bit difficult to render an immersive experience on. Maybe something like an iPad, but still a little unwieldy. That being said the demo showed off during Apple's WWDC of a real time game using AR was pretty cool. I would imagine this wasn't very easy to pull off graphically for the phone until a true AR engine was built for iOS. The same would go for Unity, since that hasn't been around forever and is still relying on raw compute power of a mobile device. Perhaps Qualcomm hasn't supported the tech as much as it needs to be truly viable on Android. To be honest Pokemon is pretty lame on the graphics richter scale.
The minute you get a dungeons and dragons style game, or some similar type of RPG, people will be all over it. Hunting for weapons, armor, or items, having random game generated dungeons that have varying minimum level requirements, and/or possible minimum party size, have classes that can be used to solo or have a party dynamic as well, and you will see the next big hit in VR gaming.
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.
Pokemon Go was augmented reality in the same way that games on the Virtual Boy were virtual reality.
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.
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.
Super Mario Brothers in AR. Now who wouldn't want to play that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Nearly every game on the App store is a slight variation of a previous game before it. We need more developers with vision, not corporate committees making safe funding decisions through groupthink.
Stay skeptical, my friends.
Or are you incapable of seeing I used two different links in two different posts - hardly spamming...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
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 for recreation could be 'GOed'.
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.
Well that "GO" thing is probably trademarked so let's add another letter to it and call it "GEO".
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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 space it detected.
(5) Can get distance for any point on screen using it's depth estimation.
From all that you can build some interesting stuff a lot easier than you could before. You'll see a lot of examples of AR going wrong I'm sure but lots of people will find it impressive, I think it could help acceptance of "real" AR/VR.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley