Pokemon Go

Whether you’re collecting Poké Balls, hatching eggs, training at the Poké Gym or capturing Rattata, Jigglypuff or Zubat, if you’re playing Pokémon Go you’ve likely traded sitting on the couch for a pair of sore legs.

After its Canadian launch on July 18, the game has introduced a whole new augmented reality world – one that forces players to leave the comfort of their homes to chase fictional Nintendo Pokémon with their smartphones.

Read about playing Pokémon Go on campus

Read about augmented reality and Pokémon Go

Not only does the game make the recommended 10,000 steps per day easily attainable, it’s also challenging people to explore different areas and meet new people. It’s a phenomenon that could help address Canada’s increasing levels of sedentary behavior.

Catherine Sabiston, associate professor in U of T’s Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, and her graduate student Angela Fong explain how players can reap the physical and mental benefits of the latest tech craze, and how it could change the future of exercise.

Beyond the fun of playing the game, what other benefits would players gain from Pokémon Go?
CS: This app has revolutionized the way people move, especially adults. Most people don’t associate physical activity with fun, but this game has combined play and challenge with walking, which is the best full body exercise. Players are getting out of their houses, adding a tremendous amount to their step count and building physical activity into their day. If you combine the game with monitoring your step count, you can define your new norm.

The majority of Canadians are far too sedentary. We estimate that 65 to 85 per cent of our day is spent sitting. If you can transform even five per cent of that into light intensity exercise, there are definitely metabolic and mental health benefits.

AF: For people who wouldn’t categorize themselves as physically active, it’s a great way to get started. Perhaps they think that walking 5 km is really intimidating, but I can guarantee that a lot of people who were at the Canadian launch of Pokémon Go walked at least that distance. To hatch one of your Pokémon Eggs, you need to walk 10 km. Since the game is a progression, the goals are attainable and suddenly that distance doesn’t seem so far. I’m at level 10 and I really want to hatch a Pikachu.

How is Pokémon Go different than past exercise mobile apps?
CS: Usually exercise apps last for about three months. People download them, use them very little for three months and then take them off their phones within six months. Pokémon Go has a level of complexity that engages players but also allows them to set attainable goals. If you were to study the game and see how it uses strategies to change peoples’ behavior, you would note that it has the main successful components of any exercise program: goal setting, rewards, self-monitoring and social support. It’s also more personal than traditional exercise apps because you use your camera to play the game in real time.

AF: People believe one of the biggest barriers to physical activity is time. But the explosion of this app shows that this isn’t a true barrier. One of the biggest hurdles for getting active is transitioning from light to moderate or vigorous physical activity. Now all of a sudden an app is helping people make that transition.

Why is the social aspect of the game important?
CS: In general, to be successful in physical activity it helps to share a common goal with others. Angela’s research focuses on the role of social support in physical activity and it’s important to have that connection to continue to stay motivated.

AF: The social aspect of the game is huge. At the launch party I ran into a girl I knew in high school and I hadn’t seen her in eight or nine years. The next day I was walking down the street and a little boy with his mother asked me, “Are you catching Pokémon?” The game forces you to talk to other people and it’s helping different generations to interact and become more active.

What advice would you give to players for staying healthy and having fun?
CS: Don’t just take the path of least resistance. If you have the opportunity to do more before achieving a certain level do it to challenge yourself.

AF: Grab a friend who has a smartphone and play the game together so you can motivate each other. It’s important to build in that social aspect.

Do you think Pokémon Go will become a lasting trend? How do you see it evolving in the future?
CS: This is a new technology and the functionality of smartphones is expanding – so there’s only room to grow. It will be interesting to see how it evolves into measuring physical activity like cycling and running. I could see Nintendo incorporating mapping and step count to give players physical activity feedback.

AF: The popularity of games often dies out, but Pokémon fans and gamers are very passionate. I think this new technology has fundamentally changed the way people will move in the future. I’m excited to see what tech companies come out with next.

Pikachu sightings, rumours of Jigglypuff: Pokémon GO at the University of Toronto

lanthierj — Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:19:16 +0000

Pikachu sightings, rumours of Jigglypuff: Pokémon GO at the University of Toronto

lanthierj Wed, 07/20/2016 - 13:19

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(photos and Storify by Romi Levine)

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Geography and Planning

Subheadline

Red, Blue or Yellow team? Come for class, stay to hunt pocket monsters

It’s hard to avoid getting caught up in Pokémon GO mania – whether you jumped on the bandwagon after (or even before) the app’s official Canadian launch on Sunday, or passed by countless groups of people glued to their phones, flicking at strange cartoon monsters on their screen.

“It’s kind of like Fitbit for geeks,” says Vicky McArthur, assistant professor at University of Toronto Mississauga Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology.

“It gets you out the door to try to find new Pokémon and gets you exploring your own neighbourhood in ways you wouldn’t otherwise have done.”

She says the longstanding Pokémon brand is what gets people to download the game, but the clever augmented reality interface is what keeps people hooked.

Don Boyes, associate professor, teaching stream, in U of T's department of geography and planning, is an expert on geographic information systems (GIS). Boyes tweeted: “PokemonGo is a great example of a #GPS-based location service – I'll be covering this in my fall #GIS classes!”

The game has been a huge success for app maker Niantic Inc., and for part-owner Nintendo – whose stock has gone through the roof since its debut. And this month, Nintendo is set to bring in even more cash with the release of Pokémon GO Plus – a $35 device that makes it easier to catch those pesky Pokémon.

Pokémon GO craze shows that augmented reality is hitting its stride, U of T experts say

lavende4 — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 13:39:01 +0000

Pokémon GO craze shows that augmented reality is hitting its stride, U of T experts say

lavende4 Wed, 07/13/2016 - 09:39

Cutline

Playing Pokémon GO outside the Nintendo flagship store in New York (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Terry Lavender

Author legacy

Terry Lavender

Topic

Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering

Faculty of Art & Science

Culture

Subheadline

“A perfect combination of an application that combines nostalgic characters, easy graphics, a relatively low need for accuracy, mobility, and community”

It's not even available in Canada yet, but Pokémon GO, the new augmented reality (AR) app from Niantic Labs, is dominating watercooler conversations, social media and headlines both here and abroad.

The GPS-enabled game for Android and Apple smartphones is based on the Nintendo Pokémon characters. Players wander around searching for Pokémon, which the game triggers at semi-random physical locations. When they find one, it activates the phone’s camera and shows them the Pokémon.

While Pokémon Go is a new phenomenon, U of T researchers have been working with augmented reality for years. U of T News spoke to computer science professor Eugene Fiume and electrical and computer engineering professor Steve Mann about Pokémon GO and the future of augmented reality.

Eugene Fiume

What is augmented reality (AR)?
As the name would suggest, augmented reality (AR) is a computer-aided way to augment the physical world by inserting computer generated information into the view of a real scene. Normally, this is done by streaming one channel or more of video of the world into a device and then inserting computer synthesized imagery into those channels just in time for interactive viewing. For the most part, augmented reality is about continuous visual phenomena, though one could imagine augmenting sound, images, touch, and one day perhaps even taste. Common uses for AR include museum exhibits, automatic sign translation, interactive games, mapping, defect analysis, artistic tools, see-through displays on cars, etc. AR should be distinguished from virtual reality (VR), whose purpose is to provide an immersive synthetic approximation of reality whose use generally is isolated from "real" reality. AR blends the real and the virtual, while VR replaces the real by the virtual. These distinctions will in time blur.

How does it work?
The main technology needed for AR is the ability to recognise some aspects of how a user is moving and the position and direction of the camera. If I know where a person is and how he or she is holding the camera, I can then approximate (with a little modelling) apparent features in the real scene, such as walls, roads, and posts. This kind of information comes from accelerometers and position sensors: the same things that our fitness applications use to track our distance and speed. As well, some image processing, computer vision and AR is often used to recognise objects or just basic geometry such as a large flat region in the incoming video stream. Then computer graphics jumps in to generate synthetic images (signs, Pokémon characters, narratives, animation) and blends them into the video stream just before it appears on the viewer's screen.

Augmented reality apps have been around for several years now. Why has Pokémon GO suddenly become so popular?
AR (and its cousin, virtual reality) have been around for a long time. Steve Feiner from Columbia University did AR walking around with a huge backpack, doing a lot of the stuff that is becoming commonplace on a handset today. But AR is only now hitting its stride. Generally as a technology this has to do with Moore's Law combining with devices such as mobile handsets that integrate sensors and functions such as cameras, GPS, accelerometers, image processing, graphics, etc. So now we're starting to see AR become commonplace. But the problem is that the fundamental functionality that AR needs such as registration of live video to a synthetic character or sign is quite hard to accomplish for austere applications that require accuracy. And now we come to Pokémon GO. Here we have a perfect combination of an application that combines nostalgic characters, easy graphics, a relatively low need for accuracy, mobility, and community.

Will its popularity be good for augmented reality apps, or will it lead developers to focus on apps with a narrow commercial potential?
I think its popularity will be good for AR overall, as long as people understand that AR has a very broad scope, and that there are many unsolved problems with this technology (as well as with Virtual Reality).

What other AR apps would you recommend to people who’ve become interested because of Pokémon GO?
There are some terrific little applications that do things like sign translation (Google Translate), Crayola Colo[u]r, Wikitude. There are some beautiful star-chart semi-AR applications that allow you to explore the night sky.

Pokémon GO is an entertainment app. Can you give examples of serious uses for augmented reality?
AR is already part of the landscape in high-tech situations, for example, BMW's Mini augmented glasses, which you can see here. I particularly like "austere" AR applications that are being developed now to do defect analysis in cars or boats, or to do 3D/AR training. See, for example, www.ngrain.com.

What is happening at U of T in terms of AR research?
Karan Singh, in our Dynamic Graphics Project lab, is doing work on VR and has a startup called JanusVR. Steve Mann, in Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been doing various forms of ground-breaking AR for many years.

A lot of the media coverage of Pokémon GO is about dangerous consequences – players hurting themselves because they’re not paying attention; players being lured to remote locations where they’ve been robbed, etc. But does Augmented Reality pose any dangers?
Looking at the world through a narrow portal is potentially dangerous, but certainly AR is not the only possible concern. The problem here is one of attentional focus as well as "change blindness". The former reflects ongoing research that humans are in fact terrible multi-taskers. The latter points to the fact that in many situations we do not detect changes in our visual field. There are some very graphic examples of this, but the nicest one I've seen is a commercial (!) for ŠKODA. In fact, AR systems could well be better "augmented" to detect environmental changes.

Steve Mann

You are considered one of the pioneers of augmented reality. Tell us about your involvement with AR.
I've been doing mobile, portable, and wearable AR for 42 years now, as a way to help people see and understand their world. Games often accelerate technologies that have been around for a long time, but technologies of the present day make it easier to do. In my original system, a lot of heavy radio and wireless communications equipment was necessary, but today these features are built into smartphones. Some of the tracking systems I developed many years ago that required a large computer can now be implemented in a small device like a smartphone.

Computer games were responsible for accelerated computer development, such as GPGPU (our lab was the first to use parallel GPGPU systems for general-purpose computation, even though they were designed mainly for computer graphics processing as needed in video games).

Will the success of Pokémon GO be good for AR?
Games like Pokémon GO help to make more people aware of the concepts of Augmented and Mediated ("Augmediated") Reality, and the fact that these realities not only augment our vision but modify (mediate) it.

Is Pokémon GO a good example of the current state of AR development?
The current state of AR development goes way beyond what's implemented in these computer games. Take for example the Metavision glasses that implement a Natural User Interface (NUI). I coined the term "NUI" back in the 1990s and built a natural computational system at MIT Media Lab founding the MIT Wearable Computing project as its first member.

Pokémon GO is a smartphone app. Are smartphones the future of AR? What about other platforms, such as eyewear or other wearables?
Smartphones are not the future of AR, but merely a transitional technology on the way to something I called "Digital Eye Glass" originally. DEG (Digital Eye Glass) like EyeTap or Metavision represents the future of AR.

Pokemon Go

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Read about playing Pokémon Go on campus

Read about augmented reality and Pokémon Go

Pikachu sightings, rumours of Jigglypuff: Pokémon GO at the University of Toronto

Read more about the game

Pokémon GO craze shows that augmented reality is hitting its stride, U of T experts say

Eugene Fiume

Steve Mann