I’m bemused by the social media debate surrounding the viral success of Pokémon Go!
One camp bemoans a vision of twenty-something males playing an app or being seduced into alleyways to be robbed. The other celebrates a long-overdue repopulation of the streets, learning social skills in actual proximity to other human beings, or as my friend Dave calls them, “skinware”.
What really made me laugh is a meme posting: “So let me get this straight; People sitting on their arse crushing candy cartoons for five years and nobody bats an eye. Game comes out that makes people go out and actually explore their neighbourhoods and maybe meet people in the process, and THAT’s lame?”
You know a social phenomenon is taking place when parents, adult and young children are walking in their locality and interacting with each other and neighbours. This overnight change is ironically something the same naysayers had lamented as lost to game-created deserted streets.
Nintendo’s share price has increased by 30% within a week. Why? The app itself is free. Markets rarely respond sentimentally. An important insight is revealed by this phenomenon.
The basis of this value is the phenomenal and overnight social acceptance of immersion using augmented reality across a wide demographic range.
We’ve seen the explosion in Virtual Reality (VR) games and headsets in the past year. The quality of content and immersion in an alternate world has long captured the imagination of the gaming community, and the technology is now maturing.
This is different. Pokémon Go augments the real world, overlaying the camera with GPS, with social tools, with convergent tech, behavioural reward and a globally known and successful game. You see your real world, not alternate reality, and it has people who do not exercise, walking over ten kilometres a day.
There are incredible commercial and social opportunities to create immersive experience and behavioural change spawning from gaming technology and Augmented Reality (AR). Pokémon Go is the first viral example of real-time augmented interaction across a huge audience.
The surprise, is the instant acceptance, social capital and behavioural change exhibited.
This is a taste of “Immersion Commerce” in infancy. Business and government would do well to learn, learn fast, and invest in the frameworks to deliver to this.
The next few years will see an explosion in augmented reality and immersive commerce design.
We are familiar with the embryonic Google Glasses, Rather than today’s goggles or mobile phones, we will wear ordinary-looking glasses tethered to the internet.
If we choose to talk to a friend, we may pull out an imaginary phone and see the device as if it were really there. We may simply tell our glasses we wish to talk to Dave. If Dave answers, he will see us through his glasses and we will have a face-to-face conversation.
I may owe Dave money for lunch. I will pull out my imaginary wallet and hand him imaginary cash. He will take it from me and instantly, back in the cloud, his account will be credited with the funds, transferred from my account and secured using blockchain type technology.
I will take my last bottle of Asahi beer from my fridge. I will receive a message which will be my “concierge” asking me if I would like a delivery in time for my Barbecue tomorrow of cold beer, my friends’ favourite brews, and that he knows there is a special discount if I tell him to do it on the spot
Our workplace will untether from a desk. Interaction enhanced.
Immersion commerce is changing the makeup of business and jobs. Behavioural scientists and anthropologists will be as much a part of application design as architects and big data
So when you see that thirty year old catching a virtual pocket monster, and you feel tempted to snort in derision, realise you are staring at a massive business wave that is breaking before your eyes.
Want to know more? Contact us at Immercom