John Hanke, the CEO of Pokemon Go and a developer in Niantic Labs, shared his thoughts about VR and Pokemon Go at the Mixed Reality Summit during the London Games Festival 2017 recently. Hanke said he prefers to focus on the benefits afforded by augmented reality, a functionality built into his studio’s world-conquering hit Pokémon Go.
“My thing about VR is I’m afraid it can be too good, in the sense of being an experience that people want to spend a huge amount of time in,” he said. “I mean I already have concerns about my kids playing too much Minecraft, and that’s a wonderful game. We’re human beings and there’s a lot of research out there that shows we’re actually a lot happier when we get exercise, when we go outside, outside in nature in particular. I think it’s a problem for us as a society if we forgo that and spend all of time in a Ready Player One-style VR universe.”
Instead, Hanke encourages developers to build games that require players to go outside using Augmented Reality. “With AR, there’s a huge amount of potential to do things that really do have a positive impact on people,” said Hanke. “There is research about the health impact of Pokemon Go in particular but you can expand that to apply to all AR games. These games can encourage people to be more active than they would normally be. As a parent, part of my motivation for building this kind of game was to try and get my kids out of the house. I think there’s a ton of good that can be done.”
He was also asked if Niantic is considering trying its hand at virtual reality projects as well. Hanke said: “There are a lot of people out there already doing VR, so I don’t think it would ever be a focus for us. I’m not sure AR and VR are destined to be these two separate things. These things may converge into a single set of experiences.”
On the latest news about Pokemon Go, Hanke mentioned that Niantic is working on an updated version of Ingress (the title that set the template for Pokémon Go) and doubling the team working on the game as it prepares to add new events and more social features.
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