Pokemon Go Is a Blueprint for the Rise of Robots Mauro Vallati - The Conversation
go to original July 17, 2016

Now’s your chance to discover and capture the Pokémon all around you - so put your shoes on, step outside, and explore the world with Pokémon GO. You’ll join one of three teams and battle for the prestige and ownership of Gyms with your Pokémon at your side. (Pokémon GO)

Pokémon Go is a free smartphone app developed by Nintendo and Niantic Labs. Its novelty is that it exploits augmented reality. Images of the real world captured with the phone’s camera are layered with gameplay so that players can find Pokémon when they move around with their smartphone. Some real-world locations are also used as the game’s shops or gyms, where players physically go to virtually train their Pokémon or to collect items.

Although augmented reality technology has been around for many years, Pokémon Go remarkably is one of the first significant attempts to extend the video game experience with AR. Before that, only the strategy game Ingress – also from Niantic Labs – scratched the surface of this technology with very good results but a limited number of followers, especially when compared with Pokémon.

... To some extent, what is just starting to happen with Pokémon Go can be seen as an anticipation of what will happen when fully-autonomous systems – such as robots – invade our lives. Delivery drones, driverless cars, and companion robots are currently being tested and are likely to become common in the near future. As with Pokémon Go, new ways of social interaction will be unleashed, and new types of incidents and misuse possibilities will be discovered.

There is no clear prediction of how this technology will change our lives, besides some obvious moral dilemmas that will inevitably emerge, such as whether an autonomous car should swerve to avoid a child but hit an adult. But technology such as the augmented reality of Pokémon is revealing a few elements already. Our habits and rules will evolve in order to accommodate autonomous systems, but evolution will come at a price.

Read the rest at The Conversation

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Related: Mexican Taxi Driver Seeks to ride Pokemon Go Craze (Reuters)

Related: Chrome Extension Offers Internet Users the Chance to Remove All Traces of Pokémon Go (Newsweek)

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