CEO of Niantic John Hanke talked about augmented reality as it begins to take place in smartphones in a future of real world gaming. Niantic the creator of Ingress AR mobile game and partners of Nintendo made an effort to develop the game Pokemon Go.
Hanke explained that gamers of all ages will use AR to learn how to love their community in new ways. Pokemon Go will allow players to gather different sorts of items like Poke Balls and health potions.
Hanke said, "Farming in Pokemon Go is walking into town, walking around Town Lake and harvesting the items you need to advance, it wouldn't be Pokemon without Pokemon though, and the core mechanic of the game is to get all the Pokemon. There will be a variety of places to capture them, all over the world, in different habitats like by water or forests."
Hanke showed in a video demo how Pokemon will look like in a 3D screen, where a player uses a phone as a filter to look in to their world, as Pokemon will go around the field and strike, by flick the screen from bottom to top, a player will be able to capture a Pokemon using a Poke Ball.
Pokemon Go is a game that Hanke hopes to gain recognition as it did with Ingress's fanbase, where Ingress players have to catch portals from opponent such as fountains and local monuments, at the same time play as a group to help build this direct links required to start the game.
In addition to Ingress Hanke said, "Ubiquitous computing is the world where we're coming into now, it's a world where there's computing on every surface around us, providing a digital heartbeat for the world. It will fade into the background, it won't be some clunky thing not to knock VR, but AR is where it's at."
John Hanke sees a bright future in augmented reality. It's a matter of time where real world gaming becomes mainstream. People always wanted to apply AR technology for a long time, where Hanke's take on it is to build on a vision that was built decades ago.
