San Francisco, USA - Some video games have become popular overnight, causing virality, causing people to shut themselves down at home and play for many days.
But in the free smartphone game Pokémon Go, which has soared to the top of the rankings, the opposite is true: in the week since its release, it took people to the streets, to parks, to the beach, and even to sit. Kayaking out of the sea. The players of this game are painstakingly trying to catch the strange little monsters in the Japanese anime series Pokémon. It combines the common technology built into many smartphones, including location tracking, camera, etc., to encourage people to go to public landmarks, find virtual loot and the image of the game for collection.
Boon Sheridan of Holyoke, Mass., witnessed this activity. His home was transformed from a church with a herringbone roof. In the past, it attracted people who prayed, but later he was set up as a gym for pet elves without his knowledge. Players who reach level 5 in the game must go to this place to train their pet elves. Last week, he never knew how to explain to the neighbors what happened to those who gathered on the sidewalk and drove here when they were free.
"I want to tell them with certainty, 'Hey, I am not a drug dealer,'" Sheridan said. "I know that someone has been driving the car to my door, but believe me, it doesn't matter to me."
On Sunday, San Francisco's parks and downtown are full of Pokémon Go gamers. Their cell phone camera swept through the trees, swept the playground, and looked for the elves that came out of the phone screen. In Washington, the White House and the Pentagon were set as the official gymnasium for Pokemon. A bar in Harrisburg, Virginia offers a 10% discount to a specific team of Pokémon Go players, while San Francisco's tea house, Japantown, offers gamers a "buy one get one free" offer.
Pokémon Go represents a moment when a new technology breaks through a niche toy for early adopters and becomes something more significant. The technology in this case is the augmented reality, which is AR. It combines digital technology with the real world of matter. The idea behind this technology is to use a smartphone screen or a head-mounted device to overlay digital images onto a person's perspective on the real world.
Specific to the Pokémon Go game, players follow a digital map to navigate through the real world and look for random cartoon characters. People look through the camera of their smartphone to find Pokemon. As soon as the animated sprite appears, the player throws the Pokémon ball at it until it surrenders.
But the public nature of the game also caused unforeseen side effects, the crowds that interfered with the owners and created opportunities for criminals. They attract players to remote areas and become targets of their theft. The Australian police even issued a recommendation to guide players around the game how to play the game safely.
Many technology companies have thought that AR may start with specialized commercial applications, such as the ability to allow architects to see the image of the building after its completion. However, it is a game based on Japan's favorite entertainment program in the mid-1990s to help the technology enter the mainstream.
The word "Pokémon" is a combination of the words "pocket" and "monsters" and belongs to Pokémon Co.. Part of the company’s ownership is Nintendo, a pioneer in the Japanese gaming industry. Nintendo has been struggling to adapt to the era of playing games on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. In the cartoon "Pokémon", the animal trainers use these animated images to compete against each other. The Pokémon Go game is currently only available in the US, Australia and New Zealand, and is very popular, directly helping Nintendo's market capitalization soar in the past few days by $9 billion.
But in fact, Pokémon Go is a masterpiece of a startup, Niantic Inc. The company was founded within Google and was spun off last year. Niantic's first game, called Ingress, is a sci-fi conspiracy thriller that needs to be implemented with Google's electronic map service. Niantic CEO John Hanke said that about 15 million users have downloaded Ingress, and there are now just over one million active users per month.
Niantic and Pokémon Co. jointly developed the Pokémon Go game. Hank said that he did not know the exact number of players, but said that it is more insurance than the players attracted by Ingress. Because downloads have been frequent, Niantic's servers have encountered difficulties in dealing with traffic, and the company is working hard to expand. Hank said that Niantic delayed the launch of the game in the new country for several days in order to be able to cope with demand.
"We expected it to be a fire, but it didn't expect it to be like this," he said. "We have just got a firm foothold."
Pokémon Go, like the most popular mobile games, is free, but gives players the opportunity to spend a few dollars on virtual items to speed things up. The game's real-world attributes also give Niantic another interesting potential way to make money. It can be turned into a game-sponsored location business by charging fast food restaurants, coffee shops and other retail entities, giving people the incentive to collect virtual ones there. Trophy.
Niantic has previously won a similar deal for the Ingress game, and Hank said that the company will also announce the sponsorship of the Pokémon Go game in the future.
Nintendo kicked the issue to a representative of Pokémon Co., but the representative declined to comment on the popularity of Pokémon Go.
Jan Dawson, an analyst at research firm Jackdaw Research, said the success of the game is an important moment for augmented reality, mainly because it does not require the virtual reality games such as helmets. Expensive equipment.
“It clearly shows that augmented reality can, at least in some cases, be mainstreamed through people's existing devices,†he said. “But it doesn't necessarily make a lot of money for augmented reality and virtual reality for big companies. Experience what to do."
Pokémon Go is a healthy pusher and social binder for players. Kay Collins, a 22-year-old Health Care practitioner in San Francisco, played the game for a long time on Sunday, including when he was lined up in a tattoo shop.
She said: "My pedometer shows that I walked more steps the day before I started playing the game." She also said that the game also helped her explore the community in which she lives.
San Francisco State University student Brad Ensworth played the game over the weekend. He said that before Pokémon Go, he was never a fan of augmented reality games, but he was attracted by the unexpected sociality of the game.
“I just met other people and immediately wiped out the spark of communication,†he said while playing the game at Golden Gate Park. “We used to meet someone who drove this car from San Jose. The park is just to catch the pet elves. He knows more about this game than everyone we have. We call him a master."
The large-scale offline assembly of Pokémon Go has also begun to emerge. Sara Witsch, a student of theatre studies at San Francisco State University, built a group on Facebook, initially scheduled to host a Pokémon Go party on July 20. As of the evening of July 10, more than 18,000 people have expressed interest in attending, and more than 3,700 people have confirmed that they will go to the scene.
Hair Skin Body Analysis,Skin Body Analysis,Best Hair Skin Body Analysis,Hair Skin Body Analysis For Sale
Guangzhou Mychmed Technology CO.,LTD , https://www.mychmed.com