Pokémon Go: Harbinger of the Augmented Reality Future, or This Year's Beanie Baby?

If there is one story this year that everyone even remotely connected to technology has an opinion on, it is the phenomenon that is Pokémon Go. I recently transitioned into a job where I am exposed to the news cycle every day, and am still getting used to just how much coverage some things get. This is one of those things.

My colleague, John Abell, and I were discussing this several days ago. John’s a big optimist about what Pokémon Go says for the future of AR, gamification, and life as we know it. I am… less enthusiastic. I certainly see how the game was well-executed and how it leverages the assets Niantic had, but it led John and me into a debate.

Is Pokémon Go the Mew of the future, or just another Magikarp? (Mew is one of the more powerful Pokémon, Magikarp is basically worthless.) Being magnanimous, I gave John the first word:

JA: Have you tried Pokémon Go? Neither have I. But as a mobile app which involves you with other people in a very organic way it feels like a breakthrough platform — a code that Foursquare and Yelp and even Square in its way were unable to crack.

Photo credit: JMWiehl / twenty20

The catalyst is astonishing to me — augmented reality. Some people say this isn't AR's "aha!" moment. I say, call it what you want, this this is a (wait for it ...) game changer.

If you were always an AR booster (I never was) Google Glass and Oculus Rift made life worse for you, and Microsoft's Hololens also seems destined for applications under controlled circumstances. Now, AR is in the wild, and — like any true platform — random people are already leveraging it to sell pizza and real estate and lure mugging victims.

GL: The only game this is going to change is the game stock market speculators play with NTDOY. The power of this app is in the brand name, and that’s it. Ingress, from the same people who brought you Pokémon Go, is pretty much the same game minus the Pokémon branding. Had you ever heard of Ingress before this post? If you had heard of it, have you played it? The odds are pretty high that you hadn’t.

AR is something powerful, for sure, in extremely limited use cases. The canonical example is an aircraft mechanic. Picture one under a 787, trying to make some complicated, delicate repair, who’s wearing a pair of sleek glasses and glancing at the undercarriage. The exact part they need to replace is highlighted, and blinks, and their state-of-the-art overlay tells the mechanic exactly how to carry out the repair, step-by-step, instead of the mechanic having to thumb through thousands of pages of bulky manuals. (Read Michael Crichton’s “Airframe” for a good example of this. It was published in 1997.)

Now, exit the fantasy world and look at the reality of AR:

This giant bulky box (from a review of the Oculus Rift done by Techradar) is the best we can do. AR is like Bluetooth, in that I’m sure next year it will be awesome, as I’ve been saying for the past 10 years, but for now, it’s just misguided to think that a screen-touching game is some kind of harbinger of the future when this is what reality is.

Getting people together with a common interest is a great goal, for sure, and it warms my heart to hear about people getting together and deciding to go fly kites, but that’s not enough to create something long-lasting. All that Pokémon Go shows us is how desperate the world is for more Nintendo games. Nintendo is something that tons of Millennials and Gen Y folks grew up with. That’s why Pokémon Go is on fire.

JA: Pokémon is a disposable wrapper which will probably go the way of Farmville. The game is irrelevant, but gamification is a great way of testing an underlying utility because it draws huge numbers of volunteers into a public beta — or it doesn't. Pokémon has sure passed that test.

Long after the game is played out we'll be left with ample proof of the viability of an intriguing but hitherto inscrutable platform (sadly, I don't mean Bluetooth …). Just as Bitcoin may not survive, it proved an underlying technology that will persevere and be applied to other things.

Besides the pesky matter of defining terms, AR has been entirely associated with hardware and special equipment even less appealing than 3D TV. But this AR is 100% software. Developers can sneak this into all kinds of apps.   

Yelp's Monocle was cute, but how about if they let you lift your phone outside a restaurant to see even real-time data that will inform your decision this second? How about buildings and campuses give you an exact bread trail to where you want to end up?

Vendors can engage customers passively rather than with blunt-force Beacon-like notifications. You'll always be able to find your vehicle in a garage sea of cars. Or your family members in a crowd.

You are correct, sir: All of this is already possible. But what if Apple or Uber shrugged off old ideas instead of rearranging the pieces to create something new and compelling?

Ingress (which I agree is an excellent antecedent) didn't come close to capturing the public's imagination. What has changed? It's worth thinking about doing things like this now, because of Pokémon Go.

GL: Well, I also disagree about the future potential of Bitcoin, but that’s another post. I think the wild future ideas of having your environment tell you what’s going on could be better executed by the Apple Watch than it is by AR. Imagine if Siri could discreetly buzz you and tell you that “You’re 20 feet away from a sushi restaurant your best friend Matt e-mailed you about.” That is a much more powerful application of machine learning and recommendation engines than standing outside in a busy street, holding your phone up, and spinning around looking at reviews from strangers (while basically holding up a neon sign saying “HI! PLEASE MUG ME AND STEAL MY $1000 POCKET COMPUTER”.)

I don’t want vendors 'engaging with' me. Spend the money you’d spend on advertising on making your product better or cheaper. We already have enough Astroturf around, and maybe the serendipitous nature of travel and exploration is what we’re really losing when we sacrifice everything at the altar of augmenting what we see with data and opinions and graphics instead of just letting us see it.

JA: Greg, I too love my smartwatch, yours not as much … But the installed based will never be huge, it seems, and will always be a subset of the truly transformational device that is the smartphone. So we agree: real-time, geo-relevant data — good. But we don't agree on the best delivery system, or the what smart watches should be (another future post).

But if you don't already see everyone staring into their phones, oblivious to their surroundings, you need to get out more.

GL: I, too, used to a Pebble supporter, but then I got better. I’ll let you have the last word on this one, John, but I think there’s more to the smartwatch idea (and less to the AR idea) than you’re giving it credit for.

Which of us do you agree with and why? Leave us your comments below.