Overnight makers of Pokemon Go, Niantic announced they’re bringing Pokemon to the Nintendo Switch and the DS. Pokemon Tournament DX is a new game coming on September 22nd. Its currently unclear if you’ll be able to sign in with your existing Pokemon account and leverage all the hard work you’ve done catching and training Pokemon in Pokemon Go.
This week Apple also featured Pokemon Go during the WWDC keynote. The game’s famous for exposing people to Augmented Reality in their pocket, but that’s about to get better with Apple’s new ARkit for developers. Initially the implementation was a basic one, simply turning on the phone’s camera to let you see the world behind it, and overlaying the digital asset of the pokemon.
This will be evolved into a future release of Pokemon Go, with the ability for applications and games to understand the surfaces and objects shown from the camera. In the demo, we seen Pikachu appear as if it was on the ground (complete with shadow as he jumped). This improves the feeling that the real world is being augmented, not simply an overlay that moves when you phone moves.
Hopefully Niantic will find even more intelligent ways to use the new capabilities, like identifying objects and using masking. Imagine a Pokemon that’s hiding behind a tree or a rubbish bin and only if you walk around that object is the character revealed.
New #Pokemon games have been revealed! Get ready for #PokkenTournamentDX and #PokemonUltraSunMoon! https://t.co/Yhi9TNLjua pic.twitter.com/Mq5H3elUdP
— Pokémon (@Pokemon) June 6, 2017
