I've always considered this to be the "killer app" for AR, when it's actually ready. Seeing people pull over their car during their morning commute to catch a Pokemon that caught their eye would be hilarious.
Yes and no.. I would not appreciate someone cutting me off because they need to grab that specific Pokemon.
And while I realize that would be more an exception than rule, it would still happen. It drives me crazy enough when people just slam on the breaks after they miss an exit/turn (just keep going until you can turn around, please) - I personally would not like that extra dabble of human reaction thrown into a commuter experience.
Please stop hindering cool stuff just because you have a sucky driving experience. You'll have a sucky driving experience regardless - assholes exist everywhere, Google Pokemon or not.
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted so I'd like to elaborate: Frankly, the behaviour of people on the road is and should be of zero concern to the developer of an app that has nothing to do with driving. Should the original dev behind the port of 2048 have stopped to think how many deaths his app would cause because idiots would play it while driving?
Maybe I'm biased because I find that too many people solve the transportation problem with cars when their use case is covered with bikes or public transports at lower costs. (Translation, I think that driving is stupid unless you got an excellent reason. Please don't list your excellent reasons.)
Sucky is being stuck in endless traffic or getting a flat tire.
I'm talking about the disregard people have for the safety of others at times while on the open road. I want a safe drive, you want pokemon on the side of the road - I think somewhere on the path to those goals there are enough compromises we would both share.
Reply to the edit:
>Frankly, the behaviour of people on the road is and should be of zero concern to the developer of an app that has nothing to do with driving.
You want app developers to take possible use-cases and completely ignore them? That doesn't seem like a very good user experience.
> Maybe I'm biased because I find that too many people solve the transportation problem with cars when their use case is covered with bikes or public transports at lower costs. (Translation, I think that driving is stupid unless you got an excellent reason. Please don't list your excellent reasons.)
You are biased, and confirm it with your parenthetical statement.
People are going to own and use cars despite what your opinion on use-cases is. I personally would rather developers keep that in mind instead of just throwing a whole ton of crap out there that may actually affect my personal safety.
That said, I think the second point is slightly deviating away from the original topic.
I think it'd be highly inefficient to specifically consider only my safety.
I'm also pretty sure they drive cars in Europe. How does your suggestion aid someone in Germany that just got clipped from someone pulling over unexpectedly?
Also, your suggestion brings up a thought: I'm sure that driver laws differ from country to country in Europe. You're going to need to build some sort of UI/UX that complies with those laws if you want the app to be used freely while driving.
Ingress (which interestingly is also linked to google) works something like that. Wouldn't be surprised if they're prototyping for a big game release in the future.
There's ways for apps to detect when the device is in motion at a speed that is most likely a car and prevent the user from engaging with the app. A good example of Waze which prevents users from doing car to car chat when driving.
Man, make this a little more battle-focused and this has massive potential!
Things i would like to see:
1. Require battles to catch new Mobbles, and maybe catch requirements. All very Pokemon(y)
2. Random battles/encounters. Walking to the store and bam, suddenly you have to fight :D.. should probably disable while driving hah.
3. Proximity Battles. Taking the bus/train/etc with people and you could challenge them, all without knowing who they were. You'd simply see a .. Trainer(?) nearby, and challenge them for additional xp/etc.
Very cool game nonetheless :)
edit: Turns out #1 is sort of done, but the battling in this game is very simplistic. Not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing haha
edit2: Yea, i'd kill for 4-6 move battling. This rock paper scissors thing will get old fast :/
Here's a question not being asked: when did Nintendo allow for its IP to be used outside of their platform(s)? Is this just an extension of the animated show or is it an extension of the game? From the way this works, it looks like this is the answer to their current sales woes?
April Fool's joke or not, but it is quite impressive to see Nintendo's IP being used for a game of sorts outside of their own hardware.
I'm a bit surprised Nintendo hasn't released their own pokemon app for iOS/Android. Though I guess they're seen as a competitor to the DS these days...
Probably that; port the Nintendo games to a non-Nintendo platform and nobody will buy Nintendo platforms anymore. I'm pretty sure Nintendo's hardly ever released any of its IP outside of its own platforms.
Wikia is one of my favorite platforms enabled by the internet. In hours after any new content is released (whether it is a game, movie, book, etc.), it gets thoroughly documented and compiled by a distributed community.
Wikia is a good idea wrapped in a company that is shady as fuck and has no competition outside the gaming market.
They have a history of treating their community like crap, forcing wikis they buy (uncyclopedia for example) to destroy their brand and move to *.wikia.com. They encourage content farming (copying content from other websites with no regard for the license etc) and, worst of all, their wikis are more ad infested than a Windows 98 computer running IE6 after grandma has had her dose of free smileys.
Hey, entrepreneurs of HN: ever thought about solving the wiki community problem? This is a problem worth tackling if you figure out a way to make it cheap to tackle and monetize it (possibly by offering sub-monetization to your wikis, letting communities pay their editors and running an actual community economy). This is a freebie - but do PM me if you tackle it I want to see it in action!
Totally off topic but I really need to say it, a good example of bad wikia behavior was the unofficial guild wars wiki, that went down in quality and lost a lot of contributors when it moved there myself included, they forced a terrible layout just because they wanted ad space everywhere ruining the experience.
I recommend looking at gamepedia for gaming wikis. They're not great (plenty of ads still) but at least they don't force a stupid layout. Also curse is massively better community-wise.
IMHO most content of Wikia would be a good fit for Wikipedia. Data storage space is cheap, so why not collect all encyclopedic information of human mankind? Jimmy Wales has some conflict interests with both Wikipedia and Wikia. Plus some language versions of Wikipedia (e.g. German) are run by weird admins that delete or revert almost every new addition.
And yet, keep them apart; 'sub' Wikias set their own rules (iirc), and Wikipedia's like "A list of all pokemon in an april fools prank? OH NOES [citation needed]".
And limiting knowledge to the more generalized stuff isn't bad (i.e. wikipedia), I think.
"Side effects of the Pokémon Challenge may include extreme excitement and a sense of accomplishment. Do not operate the Pokémon Challenge in Google Maps while driving or operating heavy machinery. Our hiring committee must first battle to determine who can best judge the Pokémon Master. The battle date has yet to be set, so the role of Pokémon Master is not yet available."
I think they're all static or randomly assigned to the same spots. I see some around the Googleplex, Manhattan, Tokyo, and Paris. But nothing near me in Atlanta.
Definitely hard-coded. But I have a feeling they got Google employees to choose places on the maps by telling them to choose places they like or something like that (without mentioning what project this is for).
The reason I think so, is because some places seem to be residential, like they're places you would live at.
That doesn't really seem to be the way they are spread out. There's some in major cities like Seattle and Portland. Then there's some at recognizable landmarks. Tokyo Tower, CERN, Area 51, Roswell etc.
Someone? More like an entire division with an own budget. Looking at the video of this gig, they have a helicopter(!), a crew of actors (maybe employees) a full-sized camera team and a few GFX-artists.
It's understandable why Google is one of the "hottest" companies in tech right now.
Technically, wouldn't that just be... the advertising department? I mean, writing, production, distribution, GOALS, are all... the exact same as advertising.
Only better, because good April Fools projects are awesome.
It wouldn't surprise me if a bunch of the work was contributed by engineers using 20% time (no, it's not dead) who wanted to make the April Fool's hack happen.
I've seen Cambridge Googlers (from the ITA acquisition) come in over the weekend playing with an RC helicopter to get some video footage of the old ITA building and the old ITA logo before they moved into their new digs in the expanded Google campus in Kendall Square. And they did it just for fun! (BTW, trying to keep a RC helicopter steady in the face of winds near things like cliffs or buildings is not so easy....)
I'm sure Google provided support in some fashion, but very often in terms of engineering effort, these sorts of thing are 100% done by passionate Googlers using 20% time. Often, people who want to make things like this happen will recruit people outside of their immediate product area, who have special expertise that might be needed. There are definitely people at Google with private pilot's licenses, and almost certainly Googlers who can fly (real) helicopters....
One of the really neat things about working for Google is getting to hang out with people who are way smarter than you, and who often have all sorts of interesting skills and talents you don't have --- yet. :-)
I don't think the helicopter is a full-sized helicopter - cheap, miniaturized cameras and control systems mean you can get quite good helicopter-quality RC-copter/multicopter/RC plane aerial shoots for a few thousand dollars commercially, or buy the hardware and fly it yourself for probably in the ~$1k hardware range plus the time needed to learn how to get good shots.
I found the resource involved in this pretty crazy as well, though. Definitely a lot more than most companies would spend on April Fool's day, and I doubt it's their only stunt either.
This would probably be more popular than Ingress if they did it right. And yes, combined
with the "other" AR (augmented vs alternate) it would be revolutionary.
Seriously, what are they waiting for. I'm not a teenager anymore, but If this was a serious app I would totally go catch a few, granted as a joke. And kids would go crazy over this, every single one already has the pokedex( smartphone ), that basically has all required capabilities.
So far the best luck I've had is googling landmarks (eiffel tower, white house, grand canyon, etc.).
Will be interesting to see the compiled list of where they are all located once people start finding more of them.
I'm surprised that the Google Maps team didn't work with the Ingress team to make this a proper AR game. Maybe there wasn't enough time, or they thought it was too complex?
Tangentially related, for those interested, I just revived an app that I found a while ago to run on recent ruby/sinatra to make pokemon creatures https://github.com/cpg/pokemaker
