Option 2A Topic II: Pokémon Go

So I downloaded Pokémon Go on the day it came out. People at the office had been playing it a few days before — they were dedicated enough to create US iTunes accounts to manage this. I wanted to know what all the hype was about and it was fun, at first. I already live quite an active lifestyle so this meant I could quickly get ahead, everywhere I walked, collected balls and fought in battles. Personally, I felt this detracted from what I normally would have been doing, which was just walking and actually appreciating the outside. This annoyed me a bit, when I’d got home, thinking that I’d wasted my thinking time playing Pokémon. For a lot of other people though, it was actually an excuse and a reason to get out of the house and to do a bit of exercise. The hype however, soon died down at the end of summer, when it became easier to stay inside because of the rain. Near the end of summer, I met the creator of Run an Empire, another kind of augmented reality game, which involved actually running and doing some more exercise. This actually convinced me to go running more often and I enjoyed it a lot more, because the accomplishment was more concrete as well as the fact that it didn’d interrupt me when I was outside and the ‘game’ aspect of the app was just for before and after your run, therefore not disturbing you in the way that I felt Pokémon did.

I do think that AR could have a significant impact on the world today and how we interact with the environment, however at the moment, everythign that comes to the market seems to be quite short lived.