A World on Top of Another: Pokemon GO and Augmented Reality
The arrival of Pokémon GO has not been front page news for only American outlets. Just days after its US release on July 6th, Canada’s streets flooded with participants in one of the most impactful technology marvels in recent years.
Pokémon GO takes the themes, characters, and storyline of a classic Nintendo game to create a novel and immersive experience of augmented reality. Augmented reality describes a technology’s approach to connecting the user to the physical world through computer-generated sound, video, and graphics that are superimposed into the user’s own environment. In the case of Pokémon GO, perhaps the reason Nintendo’s market value has increased over $7.5 billion dollars since its release is this approach.
The implications for technology is immense. It means the further integration of man-made reality and actual reality. However, with the advent of Pokémon GO and augmented reality, the social implications prove to be just as impactful as the technological. Innovations in technology always impact how we interact with one another but to varying degrees.
Snapchat, the social media app that allows users to send highly personalized photos and videos to one another, allows content to be seen only briefly before it disappears and becomes irretrievable. Dan Kim in a Business Collective editorial acknowledges that “the Snapchat effect is not really an evolutionary advance in human communication.” That is, this method of communication serves only as a “disguised reversion to the ways we have been speaking to each other since the telephone.” Traditionally, everything was shared in real time and messages became irretrievable in contrast to instant messaging and email.
This is not the effect Pokémon GO is having on the way individuals interact with their social environments. The “Pokémon GO Effect” is new. John C. Havens, technology writer and author, sees augmented reality as a shortcut to interacting with data in a new way. Where smartphones, computers, and other screens act as a way to deliver data to its user, augmented reality allows data to be delivered through the user’s own experience with the real world.
Pokémon GO becomes clearly an initial version of augmented reality when the possibilities for Google Glass are considered — the hands-free access to personal data set against a backdrop of the user’s physical space. However, Pokémon GO, I suspect, is well on its way. It has already created an artificial world layered on top of a real one.
