A Year After ‘Pokémon Go,’ Where Are the Augmented-Reality Hits?

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.

Seeing as plenty of companies are wanting to cash in on the visual definition of AR, perhaps we need a differentiated term here? If you wanted to highlight the locational aspect, perhaps something like "augmented cartography" but I think the idea goes beyond harnessing position data... it's more generally about annotating reality, in a way.

> "the nascent technology, which blends digital images with a person’s view of the real world."

Pokemon Go may not have deeply integrated with reality, but it brought the game "out of the screen".

"Geo-AR" reached an early user awareness peak when foursquare was exciting and it is still very much alive in niches like Strava segments.

But you're not augmenting your senses that perceive the reality. Using the app to check if an entity exists near you is nothing more than just a reference check; it's like looking up Yelp reviews for the restaurant you're in.

Technically... yes. But that would make any location-tracking application technically "AR" too.

Yelp is an AR application (it's Monocle mode) in much more of a real way tham just slapping stuff on landmarks and using GPS.

Lets face it - "Augmented Reality" to most people means real-time video overlay and enhancement. Maps data isn't reality, it's a representation of it. Real-time video through a devices camera is a reflection of reality so augmenting that is much more towards the spirit of the term.

Also, 3D movies only seem to be getting better. Pretty sure it's not a fad at this point.

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.

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.

Word Lens.

It placed a Minecraft creation into your environment in realtime. Though it seemed mostly like a tech demo without much of a point, it was pretty impressive when I played with it.

So, not really impressed by pokemon go.

Toyota 86 AR

Though you do have to put down a marker to indicate where you want the center of the racetrack to be, so there's not much analysis going on.

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.

Just like with AR functionality on phones, the functionality on the 3DS just didn't turn out to be that useful or interesting for video games.

But since I've never played one for more than 30min I guess I can't speak on that.

AR can be used practically anywhere, by almost anyone, on a consumer-level phone. VR, by contrast, requires a fixed space, a certain amount of physical wellness, and expensive equipment.

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.