Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Catch Some Pokemon and Glimpse the Future

It may not be true augmented reality, but Pokemon Go shows where smartphones are going.

July 18, 2016 at 2:00 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Everyone's playing.
Photographer: William West/AFP/Getty Images

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One of the interesting debates over Pokemon Go, the addictive smartphone game that 9.5 million Americans play -- and probably a lot more than that now -- is whether it's truly augmented reality (AR), an up-and-coming companion technology to virtual reality (VR).

The question may seem largely philosophical, but the philosophy of how we use electronic devices is important: The post-smartphone era is just beginning.