Pokemon Go Executive Teases AR Playground

Niantic's CEO recently teased that a long-awaited feature for Pokemon Go could be coming [...]

By Christian Hoffer

Niantic's CEO recently teased that a long-awaited feature for Pokemon Go could be coming soon.

Earlier today, John Hanke, the CEO of Pokemon Go developer Niantic, posted a video of him testing out the AR Playground function in the game. The AR Playground allows players to interact with their Pokemon and take photographs of them outside of battle.

Pokemon Go first teased the AR Playground feature over a year ago, but has mostly remained silent about the feature since. While Pokemon Go has added new AR features (such as the AR+ mode, which will be added to Android phones in the near future), they've mostly remained silent about the AR Playground besides noting that it was still in their development pipeline.

However, the AR Playground could be coming to Pokemon Go very soon. Niantic is hosting a special event at Roppongi Hills in Japan to test out new features, including the AR Playground feature for Pokemon Go. The event also included a special "AR Audio" mode in which players used a special device (seen below) to collect Pokemon cries. Once the game detected the Pokemon cry, players could interact with them and catch them using the AR+ mode.

Pokemon Go has remained committed to bulking up its various AR feature, even though the features seemed to be more of a interesting side feature rather than a core part of the game. However, Niantic always promised that Pokemon Go would give players the chance to "interact" with Pokemon in new and interesting ways, and they seemed poised to follow through on that promise.

In addition to the possible new AR features, Pokemon Go is also getting ready to release new Pokemon from Pokemon Diamond and Pearl into the game, and is also getting ready to impliment a much needed re-balance of various Pokemon stats and their impact on gym and raid battles.

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