Tech Up! Go-Go-Gadget Pokémon

"..We've only scratched the surface of gameplay that we want to create."
- John Hanke, Niantic.

Since 2011, the European Space Agency has been launching a large number of satellites to form the "Galileo Constellation"...

"As of May 2016 the system has 14 of 30 satellites in orbit. Galileo will start offering Early Operational Capability from 2016, go to Initial Operational Capability in 2017-18 and reach Full Operational Capability in 2019."

It gets better, though, because the more satellites your phone can receive signals from, the more accurate it can place itself. It's actually possible to use both GPS and Galileo at the same time. This means if you have good  reception of the existing GPS network and Galileo, you could even position your phone to within a few centimetres.

What does this mean for Pokémon players, though? Well, it means more accurate placement of everything. Pokémon should be able to appear on the correct side of a road, house, or building, or even on top of a water fountain. In short, things will be less "fuzzy" in terms of where they are. It won't yet be true "fixed to the real world" AR, but it would be a lot better, and it should happen automatically as phones start to support the new signals. Niantic doesn't even have to work for this one!

Artificial Intelligence (AI):
When you look around your room right now, you instantly know what things are: computer, table, chair… elephant. Computers, however, until recently, did not; they only knew an array of pixel values without any context. However, thanks to pretty recent AI developments, computers can now understand and interpret those pixels to know what they are actually looking at; for example, right now you can send a image to Google and it will tell you what's in it:

Go on, take a photo or even draw something, and then upload to Google, and its AI will work out what it contains, together with how sure it is. While obviously not perfect, it's incredibly impressive.

Now, imagine how this would tie to Pokémon. Imagine if your phone's camera knew what it was looking at, if it knew what a building was, or even a tree, car, or a mountain lion! It could potentially make the Pokémon behave and react correctly around those objects, or even give a more finely-tuned "attraction," making Pokémon hang around where you expect them to. They could even react, at least somewhat, to real life pets and wildlife, making them seem more alive and part of the world around them.

The only thing stopping this tech being used now is speed and cost - processing the odd image uploaded is one thing, but processing tens of millions of Pokémon players' images every few seconds will clearly take considerably more effort.

Tango/Other 3D Sensing:
At the moment, Pokémon are displayed by simply pasting their pixels on top of a camera image. Like a sticker on the screen, they can never go behind anything. This is because phones at the moment have no sense of depth. They don't know what pixels are in front of what other pixels, and so they can never place anything in-between. Augmented Reality at the moment consists just of pasting things over the camera feed. Thankfully this will change, because phones are becoming equipped with 3D sensing systems.

One sensing system, which seems mostly likely to catch on, is Google's project, Tango. The very first "Tango" equipped phones are just starting to come out, so it will be awhile before they are mainstream, and a while longer before Apple presumably has its own version.

For US$3000 you can get a complete standalone head-mounted display (HMD) able to mix the real and virtual together, synced perfectly. It's still 'Generation 1' hardware, though, with a limited field of view, and while it works outdoors, the large form factor and limited battery makes it far from practical. It's today's tech, though, and developers can buy this now.

Following just behind Hololens is MagicLeap:

Provided these companies can show that there's a viable market, it's safe to say that this tech will get smaller, better, cheaper, and lighter. After all, when has tech not?

In less than a decade, then, consumers should have outdoor AR specs, which while not perfect, will let people live in a hybrid world of real and virtual. For gaming, entertainment, information, or practical uses, there will be virtual objects and information whenever needed - potentially replacing computer monitors completely. Also, one of the key things leading to this half virtual world will be Pokémon - although they won't be pocket-sized monsters anymore…

11 years - Team Instinct wins Pokémon Go. Game shuts down.