I haven’t played with Pokémon Go (PG) yet. But I have to say that I’ve never seen an app (in general) as sticky as the PG app. I mean, wow. I’m totally impressed by its adoption.
For example, a few evenings ago while at the Domain in Austin, literally, 8 out of 10 people were playing the AR game. How do I know? Because I asked people what they were doing while using their mobile handset. And I’m talking about kids, teenagers and adults — EVERYONE!
I’m blown away.
There are a number of aspects that I find fascinating about PG:
1) The amazing adoption.
2) The game bringing people together, in groups, sharing and having fun.
3) The game bringing people outside of their homes (again, in masses, in groups, and having fun).
I’m happy about the visibility that PG has been giving to Augmented Reality (AR). I’ve been a big fan of AR since day one — more for business use cases, and I’m still a big fan. A few years ago I spent some time helping BigPlayAR and morganwarstler@ a bit with their BigPlayAr project (click link to see Vimeo) which was based on Qualcomm’s Vuforia SDK (now part of PTC), and that was awesome; so much potential.
Today (I hope) Pokémon Go is helping open the door and help raise the awareness and adoption of AR across many different use cases and industries — lots of potentials in my opinion. Today, AR on mobile is ready for the masses, as proven by Pokémon Go, while we wait for the right AR Glasses tech, form-factors and cost, to be ready for the masses.
/ceo