Pokemons made them visible - the overlooked electrical boxes
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TAIPEI - As people gather in the least expected places pursuing imaginary Pokemon with their smartphones, an oft-neglected fixture of urban life is getting some attention from the press: the transformer box.
Since Pokemon Go was launched in Taiwan Saturday, daily life has seen numerous disruptions, including the swelling popularity of decades-old electrical transformer boxes.
If you wander long enough there is no doubt you will bump into one of these plain-looking boxes -- they are critical to households and businesses – but unlike many useful objects in the world, people tend to neglect them, or even to think they are eyesores.
But the recent creature-catching trend is putting these boxes under the national spotlight as players swarm toward them, faces glued to their smartphones.
Taiwanese players have discovered that these real-world green boxes are often the “PokeStops” in the virtual world.
PokeStops are where players purchase Poke Balls and other props with in-game money -- items essential for battling and capturing Pokemon.
From Ingress Portals to PokeStops
But it’s no coincidence that these transformer boxes are Pokemon supply stations.
Before the phenomenal success of Pokemon Go, the mother company Niantic developed a similar version of the game called Ingress, which did not achieve the same level of popularity as the explosive Pokemon Go.
Ingress also contained supply stations, called “portals,” which players could set them up themselves, but they had to be objects or buildings available to the public.
In other words, portals cannot be set up in your home or in private business.
The company had said that their intention was to allow players to learn more about local history by setting up portals at local monuments and historic buildings.
However, players instead, understandably, set up the stops in spaces with convenient access to their homes and schools.
And these ubiquitous electrical boxes fit all criteria.
According to a previous Ingress player and well-known columnist Dr. Antonio Carlos Ko, Pokemon Go inherited the same system used in Ingress, and the old portals became the PokeStops.
