Niantic Chief Wants Pokémon Go Contact Lenses

While Pokémon Go has become a roaring success, fears have grown over the safety of players as Pokémon hunters – their hazard awareness impaired while they are glued to the screens of their smartphones – have become involved in road traffic accidents, robberies, and even shootings.

Developer Niantic Labs, though, foresees a future where players observe the world of pocket monsters through their own eyes, aided by smart contact lenses for a more immersive augmented reality experience. Niantic CEO John Hanke sees a day when Pokémon hunters can explore their surroundings without seeing it through the prism of a smartphone.

“That park near your house, you drive by it every day, and you never stop there,” Hanke to the LA Times. “What would happen if people actually used it? Would it get better? Would people volunteer to clean it up when the clean-up day comes around once a year?”

According to Hanke, players of Niantic’s previous game Ingress – of which Pokémon Go is effectively a reskin – walked 161 million miles last year. Considering the phenomenal popularity of Pokémon Go, its players are set to decimate that distance over the same time period.

“Hanke, a science-fiction fanatic, said he expects smartwatches, fitness trackers and other wearables to eventually converge into glasses or, preferably, contact lenses that can place customized virtual overlays directly over sightlines — instead of people having to look down at a phone,” the LA Times’ Paresh Dave reports, with Hanke – who has worked with the Google Glass team in the past – claiming it’s “going to be created within our lifetime.”

The phenomenal interest in Pokémon Go has recently been undermined by Niantic removing the faulty nearby Pokémon tracking feature rather than fix it. The company has assured players, though, that tracking will return at an undetermined point in the future.