Pokemon Go To Get Trading, Might Come To HoloLens

Pokemon Go is, of course, the biggest news for the past few days, leading to some amusing and not so amusing tales. And the narrative is far from over. Dipping into the less serious side of the AR game, developers Niantic Labs shared some insight into the future of the still newborn title. Trading Pokemon, one of the favorite aspects of the game for hard core players, will indeed be coming, though the timetable for that hasn't been hinted yet. What Niantic is teasing, however, is the possibility of Pokemon Go coming to standalone AR headsets, like, for example, the Microsoft HoloLens.

Pokemon's popularity wasn't simply because of the collection aspect of the game. Developers GameFreak ingeniously set the initial games up so that it would be impossible to collect all available Pokemon on your own. You'd have to trade with other players who own other versions of the game that had other Pokemon available. It made Pokemon a more social game, which wasn't exactly common at the time it launched.

Niantic Labs is, of course, intent on bringing that to Pokemon Go itself. In fact, it claims that it is one of the core virtues of the new AR title. The developers didn't go into much detail, but suffice it to say, it is already familiar with injecting real-world social elements into virtual games. Its previous title, Ingress, was even more a social game than Pokemon Go.

But Pokemon Go is also more than just a mobile rendition of the iconic franchise. It is also one of the first massively popular AR games in existence. But Niantic admits that, as it stands now, the AR facilities in Pokemon Go are very basic. Improvements will be coming, and CEO John Hanke hinted that it might be fun to take advantage of dedicated AR headsets. Very few of those exist in the wild, unlike these Pokemon, which probably implies the HoloLens. How that will work in practice will also be interesting to see, as the HoloLens is anything but bulky, conspicuous, and expensive.

In the meantime, Microsoft's other set of users are dying to get their hands on some Pokemon Go action themselves. A petition has been launched to bring the game to Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile, arguing how those platforms combined represent a huge chunk of users in the world. That said, Niantic Labs hasn't brought its previous Ingress game to Microsoft's platforms, so there might be very little chance it will happen this time, even if the petition gets the 35,000 required "signatures".

VIA: Tech Insider