PokemonGO goes ultra viral: by getting augmented reality right. Via FastCoDesign:
It would be easy to dismiss all of these shares as just the latest meme-able thing to hit the Internet (sure, spotting Charizard standing in line at the 7/11 is an Instagrammable moment by any estimation), or to explain the overloaded servers and the quickly growing list of real-world Go meet-ups as a short-lived phenomenon. But over the past decade, I’ve seen countless concepts like Go—ranging from iPad apps, to magazine covers, to Playstation games—all promising to combine the real and virtual worlds into some irresistible hybrid of pixels and our pudgy fingers. And I can’t name a single one that caught on. But take a look at the Internet’s reaction to Go, and you’ll see why this game is different. I think Pokémon Go is going to prove out to be the first, widely adopted implementation of augmented reality.
Why will Go succeed where so many others failed? Let’s look beyond the fact that the Pokémon franchise is one of the biggest in the world of video games, contributing to a large portion of Nintendo’s financial success over the last 20 years. The technology company behind Go, Niantic Labs, actually used to belong to Google, where it developed a game that tracked the coordinates of people across the world, allowing them to play simply by moving their location. In other words, Go actually represents years and years of development by a group of talented people who know what they’re doing.
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