Sonoma County entrepreneurs' app augmented by 'Pokémon Go'

The global “Pokémon Go” craze makes perfect sense to Danny Martinez and Rick Vegaz.

For a couple of years, the Sonoma County entrepreneurs have quietly worked to sell local businesses on the concept of promoting themselves through augmented reality, which is what the Pokémon game is.

The pair has developed a free, interactive smartphone app they named Fuze Viewer. It works like this:

With the Fuze mobile app turned on, you aim your phone's camera at a printed or online advertisement, or a movie poster, or business card or almost any conceivable piece of graphics. Let's say it's a label on a bottle of wine on a store shelf.

The app recognizes the label because the winery has paid for a Fuze account and the label has been loaded into the Fuze virtual files. As you hover your phone a few inches from the bottle up pops, on the phone screen, a video starring the winemaker.

With the wine label still in the background and, quite possibly, a tasteful musical accompaniment, the winemaker in the foreground tells you about herself and the wine in the bottle.

Or this: You activate the Fuze app and hold your smartphone a few inches from the business card of a Wine Country real-estate broker. He appears on your screen in a video and offers to take you on virtual tours of homes that might interest you.

Another of the endless possibilities: You scan a refrigerator magnet you received from public emergency-services officials and watch a video with crisis preparation tips or, in the event of a disaster, updated details and instructions.

Train your phone on another fridge magnet, one from your favorite pizzeria, and onto your screen comes the owner, describing that night's special and offering to get one into the oven for you.

“It's a way to advertise without feeling that it's advertising,” said Vegaz, who's 40 and has a background in marketing and radio.

He and Martinez, a 41-year-old Geyserville native and Santa Rosa High alum, will demonstrate their augmented reality app this weekend with a virtual scavenger hunt at the Sonoma County Fair.

One of their clients, Santa Rosa Entertainment Group, which operates many of the movie theaters in Sonoma County, will have a booth outside the Hall of Flowers. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, visitors who haven't already downloaded the Fuze app can do so at the booth.

They then can pick up a flier with a map that shows them in what general areas of the fairgrounds they can find posters bearing photos of five of the theater group's moviehouses. Scavenger-hunt players must find each of those posters, use the Fuze app to bring up a film trailer and then write down the title of each movie.

Completing the scavenger hunt will qualify a player for prizes that include a one-year pass to the Santa Rosa Entertainment Group theaters, some of which allow patrons to view trailers by pointing their Fuze-enabled phones at film posters in the lobbies.

As Vegaz and Martinez promote Fuze, they're grateful to the newly released and phenomenally successful “Pokémon Go” game for suddenly introducing millions of people of all ages to the concept of augmented reality.

“It's exposing the technology to people who in the past might not have been inclined to download or use it,” Martinez said.

Like Fuze, “Pokémon Go” is available to smartphone owners through a free mobile app. The game places virtual characters at real-life points of longitude and latitude all around the world. The play involves finding and battling, capturing or training them.

There could be one or more little creatures - Pokémon is a contraction of two Japanese words translated as “pocket monsters” - in Old Courthouse Square, or on the bus seat next to you, or in your neighbor's backyard.

They aren't really there, of course. But if you download the game, your phone's global positioning feature alerts you to the presence of virtual monsters as you walk about. Find one, and on your phone screen it appears to be standing right there before the tree or cafe or whatever is actually in front of you.

As with Fuze Viewer, there are opportunities for businesses to bring in more customers with the help of “Pokémon Go.” The New York Post reported the L'inizio Pizza Bar in Long Island City paid $10 to lure virtual characters to its location, and quickly players in pursuit of them boosted the restaurant's sales 75 percent.

Anyone who follows the news knows that since the release of the augmented reality version of the Nintendo game earlier this month, there have been problems: There are accounts of “Pokémon Go “players being attacked and of being hurt while walking when distracted by the virtual pursuit.

Some property owners have been frightened or enraged to have players trespass, even jump fences in pursuit of Pokémon.

Noticing a sudden influx of players on campuses and satellites of Santa Rosa Junior College, district police have urged that enthusiasts “remember you're still in the real world.” Don't play while driving or riding a bike or skateboard, watch where you're going, don't trespass onto private property, don't go anywhere you'd normally be fearful of going and be aware as you search of whether you're being watched or followed.

Said Fuze's Martinez, “The technology is great as long as we are responsible with it.”

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.