![]() The colossal user numbers of Pokémon Go has turned the game into a commercial platform in its own right. In July 2016, several market researchers reported that Pokémon Go had more daily users in the US than Twitter, and users were even spending more time with the app than on mighty Facebook. And the popularity of the Pokémon franchise proved to be just the push needed to turn the niche concept of location-based gaming into triumphant mainstream success. Ingress is the game that would, in 2016, get a full Pokémon makeover. Ingress players have been reported getting tattoos featuring their team logos, planning vacations with the purpose of taking control of portals, and in some cases going as far as leasing boats, helicopters and airplanes to find portals in remote locations such as Alaska, Siberia and Antarctica. Meeting other players in the flesh as you conquer the world around you proved to amplify those feelings of community. Many multiplayer online games foster a sense of social obligation that encourages users to keep playing. It has been moderately successful – at this point it has been downloaded 10 million times from the Google Play store – but what’s more impressive is the level of dedication it inspires in hardcore users. ![]() The game’s tagline is a nice summary of the whole AR concept: “The world around you is not what it seems”. In it, players form teams, fighting others for control of portals, mapped to real world places of significance. Dedicated hardcore usersįast forward to 2012 and a Google company called Niantic Labs launched a game called Ingress. But despite the hype around “pervasive games” in those days, the concept turned out to be a little bit too bleeding edge to achieve mainstream success. And Stockholm was home to the developers of all three games mentioned above, at the very epicenter of this quiet rumbling, promising to shake up the entire gaming industry. Location-based games like Spirits, Colors (where rival gangs fought for control of turf in big cities) and ”Botfighters” (arguably the first location based game, with battling robots) added up to an exciting phenomenon in the mid ’00s. It seemed to herald a watershed moment in gaming, where games would expand past the confines of screens into the real world, which would in turn become layered with different types of digital content. ![]() Jadestone Group, a bleeding edge Stockholm games studio, was developing the game Spirits for the Nokia N-Gage phone, and it looked spectacular. This was way back in 2005 – two years before even the first generation Iphone had seen the light of day – so no, the game was not Pokémon Go. Taking advantage of the built-in GPS, the game let you discover fascinating creatures all around you, and collect them in order to use them in battles. Well, if not truly magic, it was at least a thrilling way to use cell phone technology for new purposes. The game was pure magic, I had seen nothing like it before. ![]() But history says that creating a real great AR gaming experience takes a lot of time and work. Pokémon Go hints at the potential of augmented reality, and new hardware promises to take the concept to the next level. ![]()
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