[epmaybe]

To be honest, I used AR mode for the first few days but I turned it off eventually. It had bugs on my Nexus 5x where it would do some weird stuff to the live preview from the camera, like stretching the video and other artifacts. It also drained my battery significantly faster. Finally, it's just plain easier to catch Pokemon with AR mode turned off, which kind of sucks since that's the killer feature.

I'd like to know how many users have AR mode turned off. Because while it is a fantastic part of the app, making it more immersive, if most users don't actually have it turned on it means that AR still isn't there yet for smartphones.

[karmelapple]

Although there's a toggle in the game labeled AR that turns on/off the camera as the background while catching Pokemon, I think Pokemon Go has a broader AR implementation.

My friends playing it have all discovered new things in a city they've lived in for years because of Pokemon Go. So even if they play the game with the camera turned off while catching a Pokemon, there's still a map always on showing how in-game places match up with the real world.

This translates to a weird phenomenon: the other day when we were standing outside a gym by a church, my friends and I noticed on our phone screen that a battle was happening at this gym. Instinctually, me and a few others took our eyes off our phone and turned our head to look at the spires of the church, since gyms are shown in-game as tall structures.

It sounds strange, perhaps even cheesy, but Pokemon is engaging our imaginations in a pretty interesting way.

[fencepost]

There are reasons to turn it on sometimes, probably mostly once you get to higher levels. A tip I got from someone attempting to do "curveballs" was that with AR on you can adjust position to both keep the Pokemon on-screen and throw a curveball more easily.

[taneq]

Th 'AR' mode is terrible. I had hoped for at least an attempt at registration and tracking. It's not AR, it's just a gyro based 3D app that happens to use the camera feed as a background.

[ihuman]

>Gyro-based 3D with camera feed background

Isn't that how augmented reality works? I can't think of any other way to do it, unless you are tracking specific objects and overlay something on top of it.

[taneq]

If so then the term "AR" has been diluted. :(

I was hoping for something like this: https://youtu.be/GnuQzP3gty4?t=22s

[gene-h]

Well that might be a bit too 'new' for today's smartphones and rapid app development cycles. However, there is a software known as PTAM that has been around for a while now[0]. It isn't as fancy as the SLAM demo you showed, PTAM can't build continuous 3d maps, but it does the kind of AR stuff we have been promised[1]. It ran in real time on iphones all the way back in 2009!

However, in the real world it might not be reliable enough or might be too costly in terms of battery life to justify putting it in a phone app that was developed as quickly as possible

That SLAM thing is interesting though, especially if you can integrate it into an AR game. Because it can make 3D maps of the environment, you might be able to use players of said AR game to go out and scan the world. One can incentivize scanning unscanned areas by placing 'rare pokemon' in them or giving in game items for areas scanned. If one has enough people playing, one could build google streetview style maps that are updated everyday.

Except we can do much better than streetview because we have the 3d model of stuff. A big continuously updated 3d map like this is valuable. We can use it for mundane stuff like 'does the local bar have any specials today', but we can also use it for stuff like navigating robots. If one has a big map of where all the trees and buildings are, it makes it much easier to do drone delivery.

[0]http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~gk/PTAM/ [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3s3M0mokNc [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBI5HwitBX4

[taneq]

Thankyou for the PTAM link, I saw that years ago and was originally looking for that when I found the LSD-SLAM link! Even better, it lead me to DTAM which is amazingly much more robust. Time to learn how to do GPGPU processing on Android...

As for the using an AR game as cover for 3D scanning and mapping of the world at large, technically it's a grand idea but on the other hand the privacy implications would be immense. You'd have to be very careful how you did it.

[stepanhruda]

AR is imo a gimmick in the app and not a killer feature. It helps virality by people posting pictures of Pokemon on things.