GarryP

Hah!

As you go further you find you have to pay to get the bits you need. It might be free at the beginning, but that's to entice you in.

As per most games, its bragging rights that you 'win'.

mikelincs

I see that, in the USA, in Baltimore, a driver crashed into a police car while playing the game, the police car was parked up on the roadside. The drivers comment was 'that's what you get for playing this dumbass game' FFS he was the driver!!!!

knockoff nige

I haven't played it and won't be any time soon. But it does get the mind thinking on what could be the next evolution of this concept. I've heard of the Ingres app that came before Pokemon Go.

What about (and this is thinking small) a supermarket app where you lookup an item name and it overlays directions on your camera screen as well as make the item illuminate. If it means not being bothered by over anxious sales people, I'd sign up for it.

Of course Microsoft are developing the overlay augmented reality visor thing and so not difificult for anyone to see where we're headed..... drawing fake boobies on your boss.

mikelincs

A number of firms are now signing up for it, and so you need to visit MD to get their special pokemon, and you will need to visit other places to get others, so, perhaps, if you buy a big mac, then you will be able to find more pokemons there, will be good business for those firms..

GarryP

The problem with that is that there is still not a good way of doing local positioning. GPS won't get you better than +/- 10m, then there's height.

True AR needs cm type accuracy as a minimum. Which is why Pokemon Go doesn't do anything like that.

knockoff nige

Not necessarily. Let's say all items in a supermarket were tagged and an iPhone used the iBeacon technology as well as the gyroscope (the iPhone can also measure altitude), then it should be possible to overlay on the camera screen.

GarryP

Beacon only gives you a few metres at best, gyroscopes give you angular rate not position, and the altitude measure isn't accurate either.

The question of inside out accurate positioning for AR is one of those "money shot" questions that nobody has a really good general purpose answer for, and if someone comes up with something, they make lots of money.

knockoff nige

Triangulation can make it much more accurate. And there are other ways to make it more accurate such as object identification from the camera. A store could have markers that their app (using your camera) can recognise to confirm location. I think we already have the solutions, we just need to be a bit creative with them. I'm sure the early beta versions will probably suck but it could get to a point of being dependable and even a must have app for shoppers.

GarryP

Yeah, you can use markers, but there are some limitations there too. Affine transforms can lose accuracy with distance.

You can throw serious processing at it and get something that works in particular circumstances, but general is a bigger problem.

Put it this way. Google, Oculus Rift, etc. would pay big money for an inside out general solution.

Still Game

I have never not understood something more in my life

knockoff nige

I think you are over thinking the problem. We have ways to measure many different positioning and orientation counters. This doesn't need to be exact to the milimeter but good enough to direct you down an aisle and towards a shelf.

GarryP

You might like to introduce them to :

https://pokevision.com/#/@-28.003495...42716217041016

hooks into the underlying API apparently ....

carolinephillips

This is a dangerous game- people are already stupidly unaware of their surroundings, and when they get caught up in the game they will do even more daft things like walking into traffic. Children especially have little road sense and this is a very bad idea. My husband and daughter play it, but I just think they look ridiculous walking up and down with their gadgets. We were in London, Nice and Seoul recently, and so many people were filming the scenery/events rather than actually looking at things with their own eyes. I got bumped into more times than I could count.

knockoff nige

Yeah I agree that it is a bit too careless for what it's trying to do. A smaller game in a confined area such as a park or building might make more sense in terms of safety. When eye wear with a proper implementation of a head up display gets developed (not that silly Google attempt) things should be a bit safer. But distraction will still exist as it does even with hands free devices in cars.

GarryP

Actually I've not really understood these journalist scare stories.

If you were out looking for pokemon, you wouldn't be looking down at the phone because for those close you can see them on the map, and only need to move to their rough vicinity, so it would be (find on map > walk there > phone vibrates > capture pokemon). For those further away, and thus not on the map, you've no distance or direction information on the app anyway, so you are wandering in the hope they will turn up (when the phone vibrates again).

As for capture, you want to be stationary and don't move at all.

There's virtually no 'AR' to the app.

So who's going to be looking down and moving at the same time, at no point are you 'chasing' anything?

It sounds like a typical made up journalist story than reality. People reading messages whilst running for the train are MUCH more likely to run into people.