I don’t need to tell you that the Pokemon Go craze is sweeping the world; nor that I’m actually idly playing it right now as I write this. But the game’s popularity as one of the first major augmented reality titles that has reached a mass market has sparked the imaginations of other developers in the augmented reality field.
The above video is one such example: a prototype demo of a Pokemon Go-esque game that, rather than using your smartphone, uses the $3,000 Microsoft HoloLens developer kit. Though it’s obviously rough, there are a few neat tricks that the actual Pokemon Go game isn’t capable of with its own augmented reality tech.
One is proper depth tracking for individual Pokemon; they maintain their position in the world even when moving forwards or backwards. This doesn’t happen in the smartphone app, as they maintain their starting distance in the AR view regardless of where you move. Another is that the demo is capable of showing multiple Pokemon on-screen at once, and maintaining their positions relative to one another quite accurately.
The limitations soon become obvious, however. Much like Pokemon Go, the HoloLens demo isn’t capable of determining where solid objects exist in the field of view, and occluding distant Pokemon behind them.
Upload VR has an interview with the people behind the demo, a team called CapitolaVR. The company’s head of digital, David Robistelli, explains that the demo was created in under a day using Unity and the HoloLens SDK:
“For now the Pokemon are randomly generated within a mapped environment. We are now focusing on how to use different gestures for specific interactions. For example, like opening your inventory or activating your map and zooming in and tilting your map. The thing is there is a huge amount of possibilities that are unexplored and which could work for games like these. A more challenging thing is how to access the Google Maps API and enabling it within a running app. But I’m sure that in the upcoming years when more and more people are developing for this hardware also more things will be standard to use in tools and apps.”
It’s unlikely that anything commercial will come of this – or at worst, a cease and desist order from The Pokemon Company – but it’s still a great example of where future generations of Pokemon Go could possibly venture when the technology required becomes widespread.
