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Pokemon GO using Apple's ARKit
Niantic
Pokemon GO using Apple's ARKit
With well over 500 million downloads worldwide, it’s no surprise that Pokémon GO, as the biggest Augmented Reality game in history, was featured in Apple’s recent showcase of their new ARKit, something they’re adding to their devices to enhance AR capabilities of various applications.
At the show, it was sort of hard to see what exactly was happening as the functionality was demoed onstage. But now Niantic has come out and talked a little bit about how exactly Pokémon GO will be using ARKit soon enough, and I have to admit, as skeptical as I was that it would make a difference, it’s actually pretty cool.
The main factor in the new ARKit functionality is that it actually tracks where the ground is while you’re using it. This may sound simple enough, but previously, in GO the Pokémon are just projected sort of randomly in the area, but now they essentially stick in one spot on the ground, and your balls bounce off them and roll along the ground like they’re real and vaguely influenced by physics.
This is actually very useful because most “serious” Pokémon GO players, who no longer find it charming to see Pokémon in the real world, will play with AR functionality deactivated. Turning AR off centers the Pokémon on your phone, making it much easier to catch them, especially when moving. This new AR improvement may not totally solve that problem, but at least by sticking these Pokémon to a specific spot on the ground, that may help with things and get more players to flip it back on.
Pokemon GO
Niantic
Pokemon GO
But I think the cooler addition to the game that Niantic is showing off through ARKit is something we haven’t seen or heard about before. For ages now, fans have been requesting the ability to take photos with their Pokémon in the wild in AR mode, as right now you can only do this with wild Pokémon, putting you at the mercy of whatever spawns in whatever location.
What Niantic is showing off now is this feature and then some. It’s a sort of “family photo” mode for your Pokémon, as the game is going to let you put multiple Pokémon in the frame for a group shot, swapping them in and out and positioning them. The example photo shows a Charizard with a Chikorita, Growlithe and Pikachu, but it’s not clear yet what the number limit might be, or if there’s a size limit, for that matter (can you fit Snorlax, Gyarados and Onyx in one shot?).
Regardless, this is extremely cool, and will be a very fun social feature for the game that will serve as easy advertising as players share these kinds of organized photos on social media. Taking photos in AR mode is fine now with wild Pokémon, but this will allow players much more freedom to set up funny/cool shots, and it’s something hopefully all versions of the game get, and it won’t be exclusively for iOS (though some of the more technical aspects of this might have to be limited minus ARKit).
Everyone is rightly wondering about the big gym rework and the launch of Legendaries this summer, which are certainly both big deals. But it’s nice to see that other stuff is being worked on as well to make Pokémon GO an all-around better game, and one that’s going to be able to remind players it’s supposed to be an AR experience at its core

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