Was Pokémon Go Really the First Augmented Reality App?

In Chapter 25, The Pokémon Box, Jon Collins-Black describes Pokémon Go as “the very first augmented reality app.” That statement is historically inaccurate.

Pokémon Go launched in 2016, but augmented-reality smartphone applications existed years earlier. Wikitude launched an augmented-reality application in 2008 that combined a phone’s camera, GPS and other location-aware features to display digital information over the user’s view of the physical world.

Pokémon Go helped bring augmented reality to a massive mainstream audience, but it was not the first AR app. For treasure hunters, the interesting question is whether the unusually absolute wording “very first” is simply an error or something readers were intended to notice.

What came before Pokémon Go?

Wikitude provides a clear counterexample to the claim in Chapter 25. Its augmented-reality technology was available on smartphones in 2008—approximately eight years before Pokémon Go was released.

Wikitude used the phone’s camera together with location and orientation information to place digital information about nearby places and points of interest over the user’s view of the real world.

Other mobile augmented-reality applications followed before Pokémon Go as well. Layar, for example, appeared in 2009 and similarly combined smartphone location and orientation data with information displayed over the physical environment.

What Pokémon Go actually accomplished

Pokémon Go’s importance should not be understated. When it launched in 2016, it introduced an enormous mainstream audience to location-based gameplay incorporating augmented-reality elements.

But being extraordinarily successful at popularizing a technology is different from being the first application to use it.

That makes these two statements materially different:

“Pokémon Go was the very first augmented reality app.”

“Pokémon Go was among the first augmented-reality experiences to achieve enormous mainstream adoption.”

The second captures Pokémon Go’s historical importance. The first does not accurately describe the history of mobile augmented reality.

Does the error necessarily make it a clue?

No.

There are reasonable innocent explanations. Someone speaking conversationally might call Pokémon Go the first AR app because it was the first augmented-reality application they personally encountered, or because its extraordinary popularity made augmented reality familiar to millions of people.

Definitions of augmented reality have also evolved, and earlier applications varied considerably in sophistication. That provides some room for disagreement about how particular early technologies should be categorized.

Nevertheless, applications explicitly described and marketed as augmented-reality applications existed years before Pokémon Go. That makes the broad phrase “the very first augmented reality app” difficult to defend literally.

For an ordinary book, that might amount to nothing more than an imprecise historical statement.

A treasure-hunt book creates a different reason to document it.

Hunters are already encouraged to pay attention to unusual wording, numbers, repetitions, patterns and apparent inconsistencies. An objectively questionable statement appearing in the chapter associated with a treasure therefore deserves examination.

The important distinction is that identifying the discrepancy does not prove that the discrepancy is intentional.

What we know: Pokémon Go was not the first augmented-reality application. Mobile AR applications existed years before its 2016 release, with Wikitude providing a clear example dating to 2008.

What we think: The unusually absolute wording “the very first” makes the statement worth documenting and investigating within the context of a treasure hunt.

What we do not know: There is currently no proof that Collins-Black intentionally made the statement inaccurate or that correcting it produces a clue.

The historical discrepancy is confirmed. Its significance to the hunt remains unresolved.