What JigglyPuff Teaches Us About Tourism Apps

The Phenomenon

Unless you are just now emerging, dripping wet and dehydrated, from a week-long sequester in a native American sweat lodge, you have probably heard about the blockbuster game app Pokémon Go. Frequently and incorrectly ascribed to Nintendo, who own and license Pokémon characters, the game was actually designed and built by Niantic Labs, a Google spin-off, under the watch of former Google employee and current Niantic CEO John Hanke.

Pokémon Go (PG) is Niantic’s third commercial product, all which follow their prime directive: Motivate people to move, explore, and discover their natural world. While professional tour guides may use different techniques and technologies to accomplish that noble mission, the end result is the same. People get out. They explore. They discover, and they learn.

For some context, Niantic is the name of a 19th century ship that sailed to San Francisco during the gold rush and was then abandoned under the city’s streets, thus becoming a metaphor for cool interesting things that you walk by but don’t know are there. Considering Niantic the company’s principles, it is no surprise that Pokémon Go is the descendant of a more traditional tour app called Field Trip, which was also built by Niantic.

The History and Reasons for Success

Field Trip is not a game like Niantic’s other two products, an important distinction, and perhaps a reason why that product has apparently been put on the company’s back burner. But I suspect it won’t stay there, and if you are interested in the future of technology based tourism, then a quick study of Niantic’s products is useful. Let us work backward from the present, beginning with the smash hit Pokémon Go.

There are thousands of other places to learn about the game’s details, so I will summarize the critical factors that have made it so successful.

1. Pokémon Go is easy to learn and use. The rudimentary skills are quickly picked up by almost anyone who can fog a mirror, regardless of age, language, culture, or orientation.
2. PG is not mentally taxing. Call it simple if you will, but that has everything to do with why the game is easy to learn and use. Some have said playing PG is “like giving your brain a warm, relaxing bath.” Personally, I use wine for that.
3. Finally, and most importantly, PG is fun. In an age of ISIS beheadings and political nutcases, the game offers an innocent and entertaining diversion to the madness. No brain-eating, blood gushing aliens here.
   We geeky types make note of something else about Pokémon Go, what others have called a “watershed moment” in software history ~ PG is the first consumer app to drive Augmented Reality (AR) into the mainstream.

The Watershed Moment

Now I suspect most Pokémon Go players, and perhaps even most of my readers, don’t know or care about AR, or Virtual Reality as it is also known, but just so you know ~ these are the technologies that superimpose a computer generated image on top of a real one. In the case of PG, Niantic superimposes (no surprise here) Pokémon characters licensed from Nintendo! PG is a relatively simple application of AR, where “relatively” is the key word here, for nothing about AR is simple, technically speaking.

For a jaw dropping example of AR, I recommend watching this short video produced by the secretive company Magic Leap. With financial help from Google, Alibaba and other big hitters, Magic Leap is building “cinematic reality” technology that goes beyond the AR we see in PG, which by comparison appears flat and floating in space. Take a look for yourself, and be amazed.

It is not hard to see how AR technology (MR, VR, or whatever one calls it) will be used in tourism apps, but for a stunning example, I recommend watching this short video of an app produced by advertising firm VML for Kansas City’s Union Station. It shows filmed reenactments of the station’s most historical events, allowing visitors to go back in time through a mobile device and come face to face with history. Harry S Truman, Walt Disney, Ernest Hemingway, and others come alive in the exact spot where their Union Station stories unfolded. It’s really quite amazing, however, I can imagine it was also really quite amazingly expensive to produce.

The AR technology we see in Pokémon Go was developed for a predecessor app ~ one called Ingress, which you can see in action in this video. You will think you are watching a SciFi movie trailer. A peek under the hood reveals that Pokémon Go is basically Ingress repackaged with Pokémon characters, but the two apps appeal to very different markets. In comparison, Pokémon Go is to Ingress what The Spongebob Squarepants Movie is to The Matrix. While not achieving the fame of PG, Ingress is no slouch. To date, it has been downloaded over 12M times, has attracted more than 250,000 people to live events around the world, and has inspired users to collectively walk the distance from the earth to the sun while playing, exploring and discovering. It is another Niantic winner.

Owning the Ecosystem

I admire how Niantic did more than just build a great app with Ingress ~ they also accompanied it with Ingress themed novellas, YouTube shows, comic books, Meetups, and other collateral designed to drive a story line and cultivate a cult following. Niantic successfully executed something I call “owning the ecosystem,” which is so much more than just building an app and hoping it alone will garner success. Their approach requires much more money and resource to execute, but if it is possible to own the ecosystem around your tourism location, your odds of success with a mobile tourism app are much greater.

But before Pokémon Go, and before Ingress, there was the grandpappy of them all ~ Niantic’s Field Trip ~ a straightforward mobile tourism app that notifies you about points of interest based on your current location. It delivers restaurant recommendations, historical facts, upcoming events and more, right to your mobile device. Keeping with Niantic’s prime directive, it is designed to help users move about and explore their physical world, and in the process, discover hidden gems in their own hometown. Here is a video of “Today” show co-anchor Willie Geist gushing over Field Trip a few years ago.

The Future

Once Niantic gets done counting their money from the remarkable success of Ingress and Pokémon Go, I expect them to apply the lessons learned to Field Trip. I predict it will be revived and upgraded to include AR and more game like-features. If I’m right, it will be an interesting phenomenon to watch. People will get out and move. They will explore. They will discover, and they will learn.

It’s all good.

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Brant Huddleston is the author of the free ebook “How to Build the Perfect Smartphone Tour (Without Geeking Out): A Guide for Executives, Tour Operators, or any Non- Technical Professional in the Tourism Industry”