Pokemon Go is kinda the Pong (or maybe Donkey Kong) of augmented reality gaming. It's so novel that people forgive that it's extremely limited (and there's a regular non-augmented reality game underneath to keep it interesting and make it more interesting...it's kinda like the old board games that shipped with a VHS tape of scenes or whatever or the video games that came with a bunch of cool ancillary materials like operations manuals and such).
In short: I think tools like this are mandatory for augmented reality to become a really good medium for telling stories. It's extremely basic, still, but given the improvements in public data sets (I remember reading that there's POI data sets coming along now, including information about the size and shapes of buildings and such, too) and frameworks for turning it into a game world, I think it'll get better fast.
If someone wanted to be at the forefront of some area of the future of gaming, I think this would be one of those areas. It's not getting as much attention as VR, but I think it's got every bit as much potential to change the world and to change gaming.
The lesson is more that to get mass appeal, it's the story that counts, not the technology. Technology is just a method to connect the story to people. Pokemon Go is popular because it is 'real world Pokemon' and lets you catch 'real world Pokemon'. Without that story, the game simply doesn't work. It's the user filling in the lack of an actual game with their own imagination.
So far, I spent 2.5 years developing this from scratch (including predecessor of this project - ActionStreetMap) and still believe in this idea :)
canvas|z16 {
grid-cell-size: 5%; /* affects triangulation*/
max-area: 0.05%; /* affects triangulation refinement */
color-noise-freq: 100000; /* color of each vertex will use this noise value */
ele-noise-freq: 100000; /* height of each vertex will use this noise value*/
color: gradient(#dcdcdc 0%, #c0c0c0 10%, #a9a9a9 50%, #808080); /* color gradient*/
Also, some objects can be randomly generated for specific place, e.g. trees in forest. I found this idea where you have real geodata as input for randomization more interesting than having yet another planet generator with manual setting of various parameters.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Simple_3D_buildings
In short, all complex buildings are defined via multiple simple polygons with height, height under ground, colors, etc.
For example, you can check how Saint Basils Cathedral is defined (take a look at Members list):
https://github.com/reinterpretcat/utymap/wiki/How-To#customi...
Customize POI
By default, Place of Interest data is rendered as textured cube by demo app. If you want to customize this, check poi builder in demo app. You may replace default implementation with more complex. In future, there are plans to start adding specific builders for specific poi (e.g. builder for cache machine, street lights, etc.)