<This is reproduced  courtesy The Week, where the full article appears>
By Anand Parthasarathy
Bangalore, July 22 20116: Still wondering: Pokemon who? Your kids are probably out there already, scurrying around the neighbourhood, with their noses stuck on their mobile phone screens, in pursuit of weird virtual creatures. Is it time to get worried?
Unless you have been sequestered on a desert island, cut off from all media and Internet, for the last 15 days or so, you have probably read or heard about the Pokemon Go frenzy sweeping the world. You are probably racking your brains, trying to recall when last you encountered the world Pokemon—probably when you handled that first PC in the mid 1990s. Helpful salespersons usually loaded a copy of Pokemon and Prince of Persia, along with a bootleg copy of MS Office and you might just have played briefly with those weird but colourful creatures, dreamed up by fertile imaginations in Japan. .
No, Pokemon Mk II or Pokemon Go, to give it the name of the new avatar, is not a dusted version of that mildly engaging video game, but a different kettle of fish. It is a mobile phone app, downloadable at App Store and Google Play. The creatures are the old familiar ones, but once you give the app the rights to track you through your phone's GPS, they pop up on your screen superimposed on real-world landmarks. The phone owner runs around trying to capture the Pokemon and cooperating with other players in the process. By mixing imaginary creatures with real geographic locations, the new game is the first mass application of what has come to be known as Augmented Reality, racing ahead and leaving pricey tools Google Glass and Hololens in the dust.
It would seem like a nice way to get chronic couch potatoes out in the open for some time but there may be a price to pay. For a week now, the Net has been full of doom-n-gloom scenarios of a post-Pokemon world—most of them written by 'experts' who are yet to try out the app. So let's get real, put ourselves in the position of parents who worry what their progeny is now up to and try separating Pokemon Go fact from fiction:
Read the rest of this piece here, at The Week online