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Because $3B is nothing to them. Was this your highest number or did you make it up?
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The number is suggested in the article.
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That is true, you need a battery bank with an iPhone , ideally you want a phone that accepts spare batteries , like the note 4
Once the pokemon go plus band releases this will be a virtaul none issue TBH.
 
The number is suggested in the article.
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Once the pokemon go plus band releases this will be a virtaul none issue TBH.

Interesting , I've just read up on it, the go plus band, I can still see people using the phone lots to check where pokestops are , and you have to get you phone out all the time to interact, yeah it will improve battery life. Also the band will not be everyones cup of tea. Good concept though,
 
Interesting , I've just read up on it, the go plus band, I can still see people using the phone lots to check where pokestops are , and you have to get you phone out all the time to interact, yeah it will improve battery life. Also the band will not be everyones cup of tea. Good concept though,
It certainly won't eliminate the use of the phone. It will eliminate needing to walk with the phone on (as you get credit for things like eggs with just the band). It will also vbibrate by a pokestop for you, so when walking by familiar places (eg a university, your home, your work) where you have learned stops you simply don't need to pull the phone out.

I wasn't trying to discredit your statement. It is certainly a battery hog and it would be nice if it could track movement in the background without requiring the screen to be on at all. I know there is a battery saver mode that blackens and completely dims the screen. Some have suggsted a completely 2D mode to further reduce the cpu/gpu usage.

I think the game ws meant to be far more casual than a lot of players are making it though.
 
Love this game :p
 

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It certainly won't eliminate the use of the phone. It will eliminate needing to walk with the phone on (as you get credit for things like eggs with just the band). It will also vbibrate by a pokestop for you, so when walking by familiar places (eg a university, your home, your work) where you have learned stops you simply don't need to pull the phone out.

I wasn't trying to discredit your statement. It is certainly a battery hog and it would be nice if it could track movement in the background without requiring the screen to be on at all. I know there is a battery saver mode that blackens and completely dims the screen. Some have suggsted a completely 2D mode to further reduce the cpu/gpu usage.

I think the game ws meant to be far more casual than a lot of players are making it though.

Not at all mate. I think you are spot on, once you work out your routes this will help lots in regards to battery life. It's just a question if people want to use the wearable or thier phone, I'm sure there will also be an app for the applewatch.

This has been the best invention for addictive gamers, I have a family member who is very overweight, and nothing has worked to get them to loose weight, with the parents at breaking point, overnight Pokemon achieved the impossible..... If it's doing the same to others, it's brilliant, I'll get him any accessories etc, that will keep him walking everyday, so then they release he go plus, I'll buy it for them...
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Love this game :p

Congrats on the level!!!

Damn there are ultra balls....bag management is becoming the toughest part of this game lol
 
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This has been the best invention for addictive gamers, I have a family member who is very overweight, and nothing has worked to get them to loose weight, with the parents at breaking point, overnight Pokemon achieved the impossible..... If it's doing the same to others, it's brilliant, I'll get him any accessories etc, that will keep him walking everyday, so then they release he go plus, I'll buy it for them...
Now this is the kind of PoGo-related anecdote that is marvelous to hear. My $0.02, get him an external battery (I like Anker, but there are many good brands), and check into his shoe situation - good comfortable walking/running shoes can make a world of difference. When the Ingress Anomalies (periodic all-day Niantic organized/sponsored events) happen, everyone recommends: battery, good shoes, hydration, a hat, and sunscreen. When I go out on my own, it's almost always at night, so the latter two aren't so vital. ;)
Damn there are ultra balls....bag management is becoming the toughest part of this game lol
Indeed. Ultra balls trap well and don't seem to curve as wildly as great balls (which I can never hear without wanting to append "of fire"). And $2 worth of IAP coins will get you a "bag upgrade" for holding 50 more items (and the upgrades do, indeed, stack). A reasonable expenditure if you find the game worthwhile.
 
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You seem to be trying hard to make me seem like I am trying hard. And don't twist my words around to suit your posting agenda. I never said what you have in quotes.

You do always get idiots...and they are the ones I hate. Using your sports example...the Red Sox fan that calls out of work and beats his woman because the sox lost a game that he has NOTHING invested in. That person I do not like...I don't have a problem with anyone else who likes sports.

Excellent! So then, I expect to see you posting this in the sports threads?
 
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Now this is the kind of PoGo-related anecdote that is marvelous to hear. My $0.02, get him an external battery (I like Anker, but there are many good brands), and check into his shoe situation - good comfortable walking/running shoes can make a world of difference. When the Ingress Anomalies (periodic all-day Niantic organized/sponsored events) happen, everyone recommends: battery, good shoes, hydration, a hat, and sunscreen. When I go out on my own, it's almost always at night, so the latter two aren't so vital. ;)

Indeed. Ultra balls trap well and don't seem to curve as wildly as great balls (which I can never hear without wanting to append "of fire"). And $2 worth of IAP coins will get you a "bag upgrade" for holding 50 more items (and the upgrades do, indeed, stack). A reasonable expenditure if you find the game worthwhile.

Cheers mate. Yeah I'll do whatever it takes to keep him hooked and get him accessories etc . A personal trainer could not get him to walk 50km in a week..... Heck I'll get him a new phone if he stays focused :p bargain compared to having a personal trainer with no results. I'm even playing the game so I can take him on walks etc.

People don't appreciate how something so simple as walking is a major excercise for overweight people, and if they can loose x amount of pounds and feel better about themselves, they get motivated thier self esteem goes up....
 
Lots of negative statements about PoGo.

Hey guys. this game is a game changer. I will inspire others to make create new games that combine gaming, social media, team work, general education, strategy training, physical training, traveling in new ways etc etc

I am way to old for PoGo - but as my daughters play, I decided to sign up and we have great fun together. We went out and took over a gym at midnight and so on.

PoGO is so much more then catching the pokemons, now i need to figure out how to battle better in the gym and witch pokemons fight others better (Like Water is better to fight Fire etc).

Ps. Ok i we will see lots of downside issues like rapes, fights, mass shoutings, addiction etc. Like setting up Lures in the night in remote Pokestops to attract victims etc.... But this is not nothing new - it comes with the Internet. See how much **** Facebook etc has created.

Still I am impressed about the movement PoGo has created. (And I like the Russians conspiration theories about it is CIA running PoGO to get free spies mapping up/filming areas. It would be cute).
 
I downloaded it. Setup character and app crashed. Caught my first Pokemon and app crashed. I then deleted it.
Working fine on a few million other phones. Upgrade your hardware. Better don't use one jail broken.
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At first I intended to give this game a try. But after I have seen the videos with crowds of people gathering and staring onto their phones I realized how stupid it is.
What you are seeing is the future of consumer computing. Finally, the hardware is here to get people away from stationary machines, get outside and be social with their computers. With the success of this app, dozens of other AR games that have been "too high concept" (some pitched over ten years ago) are finally getting the green light.
[doublepost=1469271721][/doublepost]The amount of people hating on Pikemon Go here show how successful it has been. Even the cellar dwellers are reacting to it because they don't like going outside and being social.
 
At first I intended to give this game a try. But after I have seen the videos with crowds of people gathering and staring onto their phones I realized how stupid it is.

I sit in an office with everyone staring at monitors 8 hours a day.....
 
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lol true, but sometimes addictive escapism is exactly what you need and there's nothing wrong with that. Whether it's a book you can't put down, House of Cards on Netflix, or Pokeman Go. Fun is fun, and honestly people need more of it. They'll live longer and *enjoy* it.

Everything in moderation. Real life still has real obligations and responsibilities that need to be positively engaged with. The phrase is "Work hard. Play hard." Not "Play obsessively ignoring everything else."

When I need a break I play Zynga Poker. But I don't play cash tables that just keep going and going. I play a tournament which is over in a fairly consistent amount of time. You win, you lose, either way you get your break and you get back to life.
 
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I never played Pokemon. What is so attractive about this title?

My understanding is that this game series is targeted for children and pre-teens and its one of the games that gave Nintendo its "childish" image.
 
I never played Pokemon. What is so attractive about this title?

My understanding is that this game series is targeted for children and pre-teens and its one of the games that gave Nintendo its "childish" image.

It's the virtual geocaching that's appealing. Pokemon just happened to be the vehicle. This is just the start. Other brands aren't going to sit still after seeing what happened here. Retailers are probably foaming at the mouth seeing this as a way to draw people to them.
 
Don't forget Niantic's Ingress game! Even addictive, you also have to walk around, but it involves more thinking, strategy and working together.
 
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Physically active? Most of the people that I see playing this game are sitting on their asses taking up space on park benches. Couch potatoes in the park.

I guess it depends if people drive to the park or walk to it. Oh, and how far away the park is from your house. ;)
 
Still I am impressed about the movement PoGo has created. (And I like the Russians conspiration theories about it is CIA running PoGO to get free spies mapping up/filming areas. It would be cute).
Well here's the interesting bit about that:
  • Niantic Labs wrote Pokémon Go (aside from the through-the-camera Pokémon capturing and the actual Pokémon IP - names and artwork - the game is a pretty clear follow-on to Niantic's previous game, Ingress).
  • Niantic Labs was spun off from Google a while back, where they'd developed Ingress.
  • The people who became Niantic, inside of Google, came from Google's acquisition of Keyhole Inc. (per Wikipedia, "Keyhole's marquee application suite, Earth Viewer, emerged as the highly successful Google Earth application in 2005").
  • Keyhole Inc. was, per Wikipedia, "a pioneering software development company specializing in geospatial data visualization applications", who got "additional capital ... from [various sources including] the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, with the majority of In-Q-Tel' funds coming from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, ..."
So, yes, there is a (historical) CIA tie-in. Though I'd guess it's more on the order of sharing common interests than spying specifically.

But mapping and filming? The Russian conspiracy theorists completely missed that boat (it sailed two and a half years ago), if they're worried about Pokémon Go doing that: every single PokéStop and Gym in Pokémon Go is an Ingress portal, the overwhelming majority of which were selected, photographed, named and described, by Ingress players, who submitted them (complete with GPS coordinates, in the Ingress app) to improve the game (and to improve the players ability to play in their local area, and you could also get in-game badges if enough of your portal submissions got approved). (By the way, the PokéStops and Gyms are only a modest subset of Ingress portals - Niantic has many more locations they could light up.)

So Ingress already got all the locations, landmarks, descriptions, coordinates, and pictures a couple years ago. No need to worry about Pokémon Go players spying in that capacity.

Now, if you want to put on your tinfoil hat... Ingress is all about getting within close proximity of each Ingress Portal (just the way you have to get near a Gym to interact with it - in Ingress, you take over a portal from the rival team, then link portals together, connect-the-dots fashion; make closed triangles of linked portals and they fill in as fields in your team's color; the ultimate goal is to make the entire earth your team's color, while, of course, the other team is trying to switch it all back to their color)...

What Pokémon Go does that's different is, it spawns valuable Pokémons, randomly, all over the map, not just at portals. They've already got data in their maps for what areas are parks, water, lakes, etc. Say, however, that your algorithms had identified a park, and you (in the form of your ever-curious software) wanted to know if there was a path across that park, or if some obstruction (a fence, say) blocked the way: no problem, simply arrange a few dozen times (over the course of weeks) to spawn various desirable Pokémon on one side of the park when you know there are players are playing on the other side of the park, and watch, via GPS, what path they take: if they seemingly ignore the Pokémon in every case, then the players likely see an impassable fence or other obstruction in between and don't even try to go; if they all seem to walk partway and then give up and turn around, there's likely a fence or some other obstruction that isn't obvious from a distance. If they all walk partway and then detour 50 meters to one side before continuing, you gradually get an idea of the shape and extent of the obstruction. If some of the players go straight across, with a pause, and others go around, now perhaps you know the obstruction is something like a small stream or low fence that some more enthusiastic players elect to cross. A single experiment could give misleading data, but repeated many times you can statistically develop a picture (a theory, really) of what is there. You can also vary the test by time of day, to find, say, gates that are locked at night (though it could simply be places players don't feel safe traveling at night, so there is much interpretation to be done on the data). Repeated hundreds of millions of times, you can refine your original basic image-based map data (shot from satellites long ago, then enhanced with things like, identifying all the roads), now adding "how difficult is it to get from point A to very nearby point B" data for, literally, everywhere.

Now, for your local park, this is interesting, but not a big deal. No military agency is likely to invade your park any time soon. But, again, they could be effectively collecting this data worldwide, for every square inch of ground. Map data (remember, their roots are in collecting and visualizing map data) that has been enhanced with detailed data about the crossability of each small bit of terrain, complete with most common paths taken, could be quite valuable. Imagine a decade from now, a squad of troops (or SWAT officers, etc) making their way through a newly-war-torn (or terrorism-torn) urban area, and the squad leader having their heads-up-display (or more low-tech, a commanding officer half a kilometer back with a laptop and a radio) suddenly tell them, "now 100 meters ahead, you need to detour 50 meters to the right - there's a tall fence you can't see from here that would slow you down and leave you exposed." That, could be very useful, and thus very valuable, data. And an original bit of funding did come from the "National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency". Sound like a good fit?

Like I said, tinfoil hat territory, but interesting.
 
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It's the virtual geocaching that's appealing. Pokemon just happened to be the vehicle. This is just the start. Other brands aren't going to sit still after seeing what happened here. Retailers are probably foaming at the mouth seeing this as a way to draw people to them.
You have that right.

Geotagged AR apps have been around for going on fifteen years in prototype and limited distribution. The promoters of these apps were doing boardroom after boardroom 'til they were blue in the face talking about the monetization of these apps. Nintendo ran with the concept when everyone else turned this crew.

Overnight success only took a decade or so.

Expect Disney to jump in this hard placing their IP on Geotagged AR app promoting everything from Disney / Marvel Movies and so on. Personally, I really want to see a TRON Geotagged AR app seeing Recognizer floating overhead on my street. I'm sure there will be a lot of independent titles messing with a lot of stuff.

A new game is on!
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Well here's the interesting bit about that:
  • Niantic Labs wrote Pokémon Go (aside from the through-the-camera Pokémon capturing and the actual Pokémon IP - names and artwork - the game is a pretty clear follow-on to Niantic's previous game, Ingress).
  • Niantic Labs was spun off from Google a while back, where they'd developed Ingress.
  • The people who became Niantic, inside of Google, came from Google's acquisition of Keyhole Inc. (per Wikipedia, "Keyhole's marquee application suite, Earth Viewer, emerged as the highly successful Google Earth application in 2005").
  • Keyhole Inc. was, per Wikipedia, "a pioneering software development company specializing in geospatial data visualization applications", who got "additional capital ... from [various sources including] the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, with the majority of In-Q-Tel' funds coming from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, ..."
So, yes, there is a (historical) CIA tie-in. Though I'd guess it's more on the order of sharing common interests than spying specifically.

All this is correct. I suggest you also look up the 0cog (zero cog) crew out of Santa Cruz. They have been doing AR going back to the Palm days when GPS was a hardware accessory. There is a lot of crossover in the re-birthed, post-VPL, VR / AR community.

Jaron Lanier is unusually quite about these new VR start-ups.
 
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I never played Pokemon. What is so attractive about this title?

My understanding is that this game series is targeted for children and pre-teens and its one of the games that gave Nintendo its "childish" image.
I'd say, don't worry much about the perceived age range. Stories with castles and kings and dragons in them are generally called, "Fantasy", and some would characterize such as "only suitable for children". But that genre also covers "Game of Thrones", which I don't think anyone would call a children's show. This is not to say that Pokémon Go is in any way "adult only" - I've yet to see any full-frontal nudity in the game - but merely that the game shouldn't be categorized as "kids only". Most of the players I've seen are in their 20's, 30's, and 40's.

What's attractive about the title is two things: 1) the nostalgia angle, for those who already already well-acquainted with the franchise through the video and card games and anime; and, 2) the actual game mechanics - players of Ingress (Niantic's other game) are familiar with this, but to the rest of the public, a game where you have to go outside and physically walk/travel to various locations, and interact with a game world projected on top of reality (the through-the-camera capture the Pokémon "mini game", sure, but also the whole PokéStops and Gyms and tracking things overlaid on a real map aspect), is a new, novel, and exciting thing. Not that long ago, "gaming" meant, to the average person, being tethered by a wired controller to their TV. Now you can grab your phone, go outside, and use the real world as your playfield. It's quite engaging.

(Some Ingress players tend to think of Ingress as "a new sport for nerds" rather than just a game, because it involves exercise and two teams battling for control on a physical playfield in real time.)

Even if the Pokémon "property" holds no interest for you (I knew nothing of it beyond the name and image of "Pikachu" from popular culture, as an Ingress player I simply wanted to see what Niantic was up to), I highly recommend giving it a try - the real-world gameplay is likely quite unlike anything you've tried before. If you do try, don't just give it five minutes before giving up. Go to a nearby park on the weekend, and give it an hour or so. If nothing else, you'll get some fresh air. In a park you're likely to run across the various in-game features (PokéStops and Gyms), and you may meet other players. Some of them are even kinda cool.
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It's the virtual geocaching that's appealing. Pokemon just happened to be the vehicle. This is just the start. Other brands aren't going to sit still after seeing what happened here. Retailers are probably foaming at the mouth seeing this as a way to draw people to them.
Other companies are going to have a really hard time catching up with Niantic, if they want local locations worldwide - Niantic has spent the last three years collecting all this location/landmark data via millions of Ingress players.
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I find that Ingress is more fun and engaging.
I agree. In its current form, PoGo is more of a pastime than a game (you collect Pokémon and then... what? You can train or battle at a gym, but there's little reward or permanency - unlike Ingress where you can make heavily linked fields that are really difficult to tear down, and large fields that contribute to your team's daily score, and you have to work with other players to build up things like L8 portals, taking down blockers to make large fields, building and raiding gear farms, etc.). But give Niantic time to evolve it - a lot of Ingress's key features weren't present on day one.
 
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