Nintento + Niantic = Augmented Reality Pokemon !

When I first saw this news I couldn't belive that. Can it get more awesome ? Augmented reality and pokemons created under wings of companies that know what they are doing.

If you didn't see it yet please enjoy:

Ok so what do we know at the moment. First of all game will be developed by Nintento and Niantic. This sound very good and promising.
To play it you will only need a smartphone, great.
Pokemons will be spread all over the world. To see them you will need to point them with you camera.
There are plans to create a hand watch witch will like pokeball. It will inform you when you will be in range of pokemon (sic!!)

Android and iOS versions are planned on 2016 so maybe we will get it very soon.

What do you think about that ? I'm worried only about one thing. To achive the goal that they presented they need things like:
1. user location
2. pokemon true gps location - pokemon needs to located in real world
3. interaction between one and another

I was working on that during my masters last and this year and I know that it is very hard to achieve this 3 points in a way that will make user say "woooow". Of course I'm far away from Nintendo and Niantic but still they will have to resolve same hardware limitations I did. I'm worried because if they won't make it as good as they plan the game will die very fast. There is many downsides of well known solutions for problem like interactions between true and virtual point, for example visible delay.
This is a very important game for augmented reality and for promotion it for wider audience. As for now there is not so many well known augmented reality games. Here we have theme that almost everybody know, everybody like. We have two great companies behind them. I think this game will be either great success or dramatic failure, they don't have any other option. Finger crossed !

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Mobile augmented reality

This is the first post on this blog and it will be a short one. I'll come back to this topic in future. I'll wirte about one of my favourite topics which is augmented reality on mobile platforms.

Nowadays everyone has at least one or two mobile devices always with him. Many of you, probably have your mobile phones in range of couple of meters for whole 24 hours. Think about it :)

That is why augmented reality has so big potential and it is getting bigger and bigger. It should be considered in two ways:

1. mobile phones / tablets

2. goggles (not Google ;) ) with augmented reality software

The first one has a bit smaller range, it still need some actions from the user and it is not as flexible and comfortable as it could or even as it should be. BUT it has some cool usages...yes yes I'm talking about games. Spend couple of minutes with google and you can see how awesome ideas people have just to entertain us using camera in your mobile phone and couple of tricks.

Of course you don't need to use camera to say that your software is based on augmented reality but as for me this is a very important piece of it.

The goggles...this is the thing that fascinates me a lot. Think about every sci-fi movie, there are always a cool looking goggles that show you a lot of data. Everybody want it ! I was really excited with first google glasses but it wasn't as cool as it should be. Using it was uncomfortable. True augmented reality goggles should be transparent for user. They should look like normal glasses and they should be also used like normal glasses. This is very important thing and many people forget about that. Augmented reality should be almost invisible. It should be like a small imp on your shoulder invisible for everybody that helps you in your every day things.

As for me augmented reality is still song of the future. Of course this is not a new technology. It is around for a long time but most of us don't think about that while watching TV or looking and the photos from jet fighters. But those are very specialized tasks, augmented reality still has some problems to get into to our every day routine and this is the goal, this is the moment that I'm waiting for.

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