Jon: Welcome to episode 165 of The Digital Life, a show about our insights into the future of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett and with me is founder and co-host Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Oh John, John, ready to go John.

Jon: All right, it's good to hear. For our podcast this week we're going to talk about augmented reality and the craze that is seizing the nation and the globe really, which is Pokemon Go of course.

Dirk: You missed my little joke there, didn't you John?

Jon: Yes, I did. You're too quick for me today.

Dirk: No that wasn't my point. Anyway, keep going, keep going.

Jon: For our listeners who are unfamiliar with this, which is really the first mega hit of what is soon to be the augmented reality game industry, Pokemon Go is the digital instantiation of what you may have seen young children playing with the Pokemon cards, there's also a cartoon show. It's basically these little creatures that you can, quote, capture and train and evolve. If you're using the cards you can trade the cards and as you're training you can fight other trainers, things like that. The cartoon of course has been popular for a long time and the trading cards as well.

What's interesting, obviously the cartoon these characters, creatures come alive and the characters in the cartoon go out and capture the actual creatures. But now with your mobile phone plus this free application, you can now go out around your house, around your place of business, when you're walking, when you're in public spaces, and you can too capture the virtual creatures that make up the Pokedex, which is the universe of Pokemon, the most famous being the Pikachu which is this yellow creature with a lightning like tail and pointy ears, very cute.

Dirk: Shazam!

Jon: This is clearly aimed at the younger set, but it is also very popular with casual gamers because it's easy to pick up, the game is free, you can I think pay money for upgrades and things like that.

Dirk: It's for the young and the young at heart.

Jon: That's very good. I can see you're a marketer at heart.

Dirk: God no, don't say that.

Jon: There's this universe of the Pokemon which is overlayed onto your every day reality. When you go and capture a creature that say might be located in a playground or perhaps on the doorstep to your business, the software shows a little cartoon drawing on top of the camera view so you can see your stairs going up to your place of business and lo and behold there's a Pikachu sitting there. I will throw the Poke Ball at it and it will capture the Pikachu and voila you now have a Pikachu to train.

There are also places called Poke Stops where you can get all kinds of other free stuff and tie into marketing of other companies. You can see how McDonald's might be very interested in this, in fact I think they already have all the Poke players, Pokemon Players come and hang out at McDonald's for a while. In fact lots of restaurants have been giving discounts if you're a certain level of trainer, like if you're a trainer level 5, which is fairly easy to get, you'll get 10% off. There's a news story where a pizza place is doubling their revenues because of all the Poke players show up. That's what it is in a nutshell. I know way more about this than I should, but that's because I have some youngsters who are into it.

Dirk: By youngsters you mean you.

Jon: Yes. Yeah, of course. It was important that it be installed this weekend on my phone and that we play. What's interesting about augmented reality is that, like I said it sort of brings the digital into your physical world, and at least on screen represents that digital fairly nicely. Here are some of the good things that I noticed this weekend as I was playing with my kids. Exercise, there are certain parameters where you're hunting for Pokemon where you must be walking to get them to hatch or some such. Going to the park, going out, taking a walk, going to new places,