Pokemon GOplayers have had an incredibly exciting summer despite original concerns that the global pandemic and stay-at-home orders might crush the game’s spirit. Niantic made a lot of quick adjustments and made the gameplay-at-home friendlyby tweaking event bonuses, spawns, and daily tasks. During the summer months, the company even rolled out a new Pokestop scanning feature for endgame players to help Niantic develop their world map and enhance the mobile AR features that are in development.
Pokestop scanning rolled out in June and offered level 40 players access to a new feature that is being used to help capture the footage needed to fully rollout the reality blending tools Niantic is working on forPokemon GO. Ideally, the upgraded AR features will makePokemon interact with environments more realisticallyby hiding behind trees or other 3D objects that actually exist in the physical space. After a few months of exclusive access, the scanning feature is now being rolled out to the majority of players by lowering the level requirement all the way down to level 20.
RELATED:Pokemon GO Is Changing Mega Raid Rewards
It has become common practice for Niantic to roll outnew tools to level 40 playersfirst, but this one did stay at just the max level for longer than usual. Considering this doesn’t actually impact gameplay yet though, it isn’t a feature that the average players was really missing out on, unless they happen to be an AR enthusiast. The new tool is mostly just helping Niantic at this point, but the entire community will eventually benefit from all of this scanning when reality blending is implemented and players are able to start exploring Pokestop and Gyms in brand new ways.
“The opt-in PokéStop Scan feature is now available to level 20 Trainers and up. We look forward to seeing more Trainers help us on our mission to create a map of the world for all to explore!”
For those who aren’t aware of what the Pokestop scanning is all about, here is the pitch that Niantic presented when the feature originally rolled out to level 40 players earlier this summer:
“At Niantic, we are working to develop a dynamic 3-D map of existing PokéStops and Gyms so we can continue to develop and refine AR features in the future. To help in this mission, we are bringing an opt-in feature to the Pokémon GO community called PokéStop Scan, which will be first available to level 40 Trainers in early June before rolling out to more players by level.
An adaptation of a feature released in Ingress, this feature will let Trainers upload videos of real-life PokéStop and Gym locations to Pokémon GO, which can help us on this mapping journey. If you opt in, you’ll be asked to record video of a PokéStop or Gym’s real-life location from as many angles as possible, up to a maximum of 10 seconds per video.
These videos will allow us to generate dynamic 3-D maps of PokéStop locations. This can give us a better understanding of how virtual objects persist and where they are in relation to one another, which will help us improve the game’s overall AR experiences. In addition, the 3-D objects allow our devices to further understand what they are looking at to augment reality in real time.”
At this point, there is no official release date for the enhanced reality blending features, but hopefully as more and more players begin capturing PokeStops through scanning, there will be enough footage to rollout the new tools before long. Niantic usually offers updates on their AR progress and world map throughout the year, so there will likely be more news on that front in the months to come. For now,Pokemon GOtrainers should be able to head out into the world (or play from home) and continue catchingthe best Unova Pokemon in the gameand getting closer to that complete Pokedex. Check back for morePokemon GOupdates closer to the event. Until then, good luck out there, trainers!
Pokemon GOis available now in select regions on Android and iOS devices.
MORE:Pokemon GO: How To Get An Upgrade and Sinnoh Stone For Porygon Community Day
