As one of those who got stuck into Ingress in its early days, I'm always happy to see Niantic pushing forward.
The only issue is they always seem to be a step ahead of themselves, in terms of their ideas being just a little too far ahead of the technology.
It will be interesting to see how truly real-world AR shapes the world when it becomes widespread. I'm sure that some day anthropologists will look back on this era with fascination, at how both society and individual human development/behaviour were shaped by technology, in terms of things like the way that access to information and exposure to 'realities' not restricted to the real laws of physics shape development.
I think the most interesting part about niantic is how they’ve made hundreds of millions play Pokémon go without niantic ever realizing that the main attraction, wasn’t the AR.
Speaking of the laws of physics, i suspect the primary limitation for this will be the power supply.
I seem to recall that there are ongoing jokes regarding existing AR games that one basically have to bring a generator (aka car) to keep up with the battery drain of the game.
There's a large number of people who will happily walk around with a power bank if there's a good enough reason. This happened for both Pokemon and for Ingress.
I would expect the rendering efficiency to get better fast. The amount of power spent on graphics relative to the actual amount of new information being generated is absurdly high.
We should start seeing more experiences designed specifically for low power renderability soon.
Why do you expect it get better at a significantly higher rate than it has been over the past several decades of computer graphics? Is there some major up-and-coming research on the topic?
No, just a kind of Hegelian turn. Computer graphics have been oriented towards emulating photography for many years. That project is nearing its end and still realism is lacking.
As people start to realize there is more to seeing than just photography, we will enter an era of discovering more sparing uses of computation.
Look to painting for a possible progression. Realism/classicism was just an early maximum. Impressionism followed. And then many other movements. Contemporary painters can do much more with much less.
The "Neon" demo displayed the horribly limiting nature of the device. The AR aspect is great, but to have to see it through the lens of the device and to have to occupy both hands to interact whilst full-bodily moving around the space makes it seem quite "cacky" (I can't explain what I mean by cacky, but it sounds like what I mean).
It's like playing a shooter game in the real world, but having to have the device pointing in the right direction in order to see what's actually there. Like using a torch in pitch blackness (Doom 3). This is where a Google Glass / VR-style headgear kind of interface would be perfect.
But since this is all just in "tech demo" stage, I'm probably being too critical. It is "cool".
People have some interesting presumptions about AR/VR:
- participants will predominantly look around in 360 degrees
- participants will be manipulating the objects they’re seeing projected in 3D
- participants will have prolonged engagements with virtual objects
- all people present in the room will also be interacting with the same virtual objects
If these are all true then your analysis is correct: headsets are the only way.
If all of these presumptions are at least somewhat false then handheld “opera glasses”-style AR experiences will be very popular.
Personally, I think even people who have headsets and spend a lot of time in VR will also use handheld displays, for transient use and when others are present.
It's building the communications infrastructure you need for glasses to "just work."
You can't just come out with glasses because there is too much you don't know about how multi-user and persistent content AR interface and communications work from a standing start.
My comment was based on my reaction to how unexpectedly badly the handling of the device fitted into the activity, and how obvious it was that a different interaction device was necessary.
And yes, I think Niantic are more of a technology / platform company than they are a game developer, and I think that's the level of their involvement in the Wizards Unite game.
Google "just came out with glasses", but that didn't go very well, probably for the reasons you gave. Google Glass time may be upon us again soon, however, given these tech demos.
Yes, I'm agreeing with you and explaining why the big companies are making such huge investments in this when the form factor and use case is still not refined.
Users have been frustrated and very vocal on the social media, there are clear areas where Niantic is pointed pitch forks at.
Yet I am not sure I would call that bad management, in that they kept the game running, core players are still there in decent numbers while casual players seem to be coming back in waves.
They can surely do better and the game is riddled with bugs, but no one is operating at that scale without significant issues, and they managed to not ruin the game while making impacting changes to the whole system for two years now.
I have my frustration with the games, but I genuinely think they made a very decent job.
As an early player of Pokémon Go since the release day, I can say that the whole game was poorly managed (and still is). Even after the initial spike of users, they can't do a major event without messing it up:
The people who play Pokémon Go nowadays, they do it for the novelty of being Pokémon, not because it is a good game. Also, Pokémon Go is popular the same way Flappy Bird was popular: it's an effortless game to handle and it's very convenient to play when you already spend a lot of time on the phone.
Niantic managed to turn a multi-billion dollar game into a multi-million dollar one.
That HAS to be from others countries then. Where I lived, in Montreal, there was HUGE AMOUNT of peoples playing that game all around. I remember there is a tiny park close by my work, it's cute, almost always empty but there is 3 Pokestop there. During the first few months, there was literally 30-40 peoples there constantly. It was always funny to see them all flee somewhere else when there was no longer the "boost" on theses Pokestop. That wasn't including the people I was constantly seeing walking around playing. I now rarely see people even play that game. It still happens but it pretty far from the first few months where it was everywhere.
There is a clear shift on who plays the game the most and how they play.
The first 3~4 months I remember seeing a lot of youngish and very active people, the heavy players being those travelling all day around the city to complete their dex.
Now I end up a lot more with elder people who manage to play during their jobs, do a lot less “grinding” but do it more efficiently and can pop real money here and there when it matters.
I am not surprise by the number of players rising again while there is no huge 30~40 people croud rushing everywhere: we don’t need to rush anymore, and the main events can easily be planned 30~15 min in advance.
If you are interested in huge crowds, public parks during community days might be the remaining attraction.
Their operational skills are poor. E.g.: there's a bug in Pokemon Go right now which causes name resets, and there's no way to revert to your old name. E.g.: the new Ingress client is more than a year overdue, and they are facing several hard deadlines related to App/Play Store update requirements.
They have, on the other hand, figured out how to run a live game with Pokemon Go, which is encouraging.
However, I don't think they have the necessary skills to operate as a platform for other game/app makers.
I can't speak to the management as I've never played, but Pokemon Go is still one the highest revenue mobile apps in the world (behind Fortnite, but ahead of say Clash of Clans).
If Pokemon Go was mismanagement or failure (though you didn't say it), I don't know what a success is. No one, including Niantic, could have predicted how massively popular it would be in such a short time, so they had scaling problems among others things. Its still the most popular and profitable mobile games out there.
Pokemon Go's AR was a joke, but the promise of AR was very real and compelling to people, so they were wildly successful and now have the resources to actually try and solve the technical problems for real.
A lot of startups work this way. They have an ambition to do something but really no chance of doing it. But if they can attract enough attention and raise enough money they might actually be able to attempt it for real.
Crowd funding overtly works like this, but it's really common in regular companies as well. If you can show there's a chance, maybe you can raise enough money to actually do it.
If you think of AR as video overlays on reality, for sure.
If you think beyond video, Pokémon's AR was a home run. My kids know where Pokémon are most likely to live. They know where the gyms are. Their reality has definitely been augmented.
Yeah that's what many people confuse. In pokemon go, AR, meaning 3d stuff rendered over the camera input, is not really essential to the game, and most people never even use it, as it drains the battery too much.
On the other hand AR, as in augmented world map, is the core of the game and is brilliant.
I absolutely agree with this. I spend lots of time pokewalking at a particular park and the other day I looked up from my phone and was honestly surprised that there was no physical building where I expected the Gym to be.
Has nothing to do with battery drain and everything to do with the fact it is significantly easier to hit the harder throws that give you a higher chance of catching the pokemon.
Niantic is currently developing a Harry Potter AR game. I wouldn’t be surprised if they allow you to cast spells at other players during duels and what-not, as one of the demos shows
as both someone who's been in the mobile location industry (having headed an R&D center specifically focused on real-time location for mobile devices), and is an avid pokemon go player (and thus Niantic customer), I don't expect them to have anything close to their demos until a year after launch, and even then in extreme beta.
that said, it's almost time for me to do another 1km walk to try to eek out 400m of "egg distance" in pokemon go.
One of the big questions I have about AR is the extent to which it's a novelty versus something that delivers lasting value. As an example, 3D movies and especially 3D TVs were an impressive technical accomplishment that basically nobody cared about. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Good to see them working on real AR instead of "render an geolocated object with the camera feed in the background" (original Pokemon Go). At least the new ARKit version attempts to track the feed a bit.
I'm curious when Blizzard will enter the mobile AR/geo-game market. Walking around questing in groups with dungeon spawns etc. using the WoW-IP would be interesting as would hack and slashing around Diablo-style. Plenty of skinner-box random loot material to keep people playing as well. The battle systems of MMORPGs or Diablo should map nicely onto AR-games. I suppose actually using distance could get tricky as people would try risky things to get battle advantages so just spawn and fight round based is probably the way to go.
I thought Pokemon Go got dull rather quickly (played upto level 35, I liked Ingress a lot more) and I still can't understand why they didn't opt for round based battles. I've recently been playing Jurassic World Alive very casually and like the overall design more. Each "catch" is sort of meaningfull and the DNA-extraction sequence is more fun than catching a pokemon. On top of that the battle system is cooler and rewards good play to a certain degree.
Before playing Pokemon Go I thought of AR in terms of overlaying 3D models over a camera feed (which is the feature I turned off in Pokemon Go). It certainly gave me a different perspective as I thought of some other use cases for geo-location overlay.
Not too bad. They definitely have Pokemon Go, the Next Generation. How good is the phone location system? Staying locked to the real world is essential for AR.
The only issue is they always seem to be a step ahead of themselves, in terms of their ideas being just a little too far ahead of the technology.
It will be interesting to see how truly real-world AR shapes the world when it becomes widespread. I'm sure that some day anthropologists will look back on this era with fascination, at how both society and individual human development/behaviour were shaped by technology, in terms of things like the way that access to information and exposure to 'realities' not restricted to the real laws of physics shape development.