Augmented Reality’s ‘Killer App’: Transforming How We Relate to Physical Places
By: Aaron Frank
Tags: Ar Cloud, Locative Media, Pokémon Go, Augmented Reality

To this day, and after almost four years of playing, I have never seen anything like the collision of digital and physical infrastructure transforming human activity in a shared public setting than what I saw at the Blue Teahouse that summer. It was due to an unforeseen oddity in the deployment of PokeStop locations in the game’s map.

In the physical world, the Blue Teahouse is already a social space designed for people to sit, drink coffee, and enjoy being outdoors with friends. In the digital world the restaurant space, for whatever reason, sat well within proximity of three overlapping PokeStops. For those who don’t play the game, it’s worth noting how unusual that is. The purpose of Pokémon Go is to encourage players to move physically through the world accumulating items and finding Pokémon. Yet here was a spot, where players could circumvent the need to move through the world in a physical location already designed for social activity. It was a killer combination.

The Blue Teahouse as it appears in the game. Players can spin a PokeStop every 5 minutes to get Pokeballs. The pink confetti shows that all three PokeStops have lure modules applied by someone nearby. Lure modules last thirty minutes and cause Pokémon to spawn. Everyone now has what they need to sit, enjoy, and play at the cafe.

For that entire summer, The Blue Teahouse became an oasis for Pokémon Go. Almost overnight the cafe’s culture transformed, and the value that guests assigned this physical space now derived just as much from activities in the digital world as much as any purpose it served in the physical one.

In a discussion with a manager at the restaurant, I later learned that the cafe increased their revenues significantly. So many people were there playing, visitors were forced to crowd the front lawn sitting picnic style on the ground; most of them playing too. Teenagers were showing up to the lawn well before it opened and (since Dutch kids have no bedtime) were staying long after it closed. On cloudy and rainy days, usually slow for the business, tables were just as crowded as days with sunny skies. For this tiny cafe in Amsterdam, the game was an unexpected stroke of good fortune and the business impact was enormous.

Sorry we’re at capacity. Please enjoy this lawn.

The broader impacts of human activity being changed by the game weren’t always so pleasant. These anecdotes were well covered in the media, but one interesting example occurred in Milwaukee Wisconsin where players left trash and disrupted the ecology of a public park. The city tried to require companies like Niantic to request and be granted a permit to operate their games on public land; an attempt which failed.

All of these developments suggest that we’ll need entirely new policy frameworks for dealing with a world ‘painted with data’ (as Charlie Fink describes this coming world filled with AR content). What types of issues may arise?:

Should a company be able to sue someone who leaves digital graffiti on their building?

You can ban a person, but what about their hologram? Who regulates the free movement of AR technology?

What are the limitations to where AR game artifacts can be placed?

Should companies be able to freely place AR content wherever they please?

Is digital “property damage” a thing? It’s the wild west in AR and this is cold-blooded from Burger King.

Example: In response to a Snapchat marketing concept that included a location-based art exhibit which placed AR sculptures by Jeff Koons in several locations around the world, artist Sebastien Errazuriz thoughtfully used a vandalized Koons sculpture to challenge the notion that corporations be allowed to freely place AR content without paying anything back for the value they extract by using public land.



Errazuriz asks:

“Should corporations be allowed to place what ever content they choose over our digital public space? Central Park belongs to the city of NY. Why should corporations get to geo-tag its GPS coordinates for free? We know they will make money renting GPS spots to brands and bombard us with advertisement. They should pay rent, we should choose to approve what can be geo-tagged to our digital public and private space.”

All of this suggests that AR is about more than just feeding information into our eyeballs. It can change the world we live in by reshaping how we engage with it. AR can determine where we go and why we go there but also influence the way we construct meaning about the significance of a place.