Pokemon Go’ players can add new locations to it and ‘Wizards Unite

                    Pokemon Go’ players can add new locations to it and ‘Wizards Unite

Visitors looking at their phones during a ‘Pokemon Go’ Festival at the Westfalenpark in Dortmund, Germany July 2019. — AFP pic

NEW YORK, Nov 15 — Experienced Pokemon Go players are now able to add to the game’s geolocalised inventory of key locations, PokeStops, through a dedicated Niantic Wayfarer tool; Harry Potter: Wizards Unite could also benefit from the influx of contributors.

Those players who have attained level 40 in Pokemon Go can submit and review new PokeStop and Gym locations through the official Wayfarer website, run by app developer Niantic.

Nominations can also be made through the Pokemon Go app itself.

There’s a short test to make sure that would-be Wayfarers understand what makes for a safe, accessible, visually distinctive and culturally significant Wayspot — Niantic’s generic term for locations fundamental to its Augmented Reality geolocation games.

Peer reviews are sourced from the Wayfarer community as well. Positive feedback promotes suggested Wayspots as potential new locations across Niantic’s stable of games.

Those include not only the company’s first title, 2013’s hacking-themed Ingress, but also Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, released earlier in 2019.

All three are based on tracking users’ whereabouts in real-time, and all three share key locations, depending upon demand; now an independent entity, Niantic itself was founded as a part of search, data, and ad giant Google, whose mapping software it makes heavy use of.

Wayfarer was first launched in September 2017 for the Ingress community as Operation Portal Recon, before being rebranded to Wayfarer in October 2019. — AFP-Relaxnews