I am already disappointed by the vast gulf between how I imagine Minecraft could work as an AR game and how I imagine it will initially be implemented as an AR game.<p>The problem with Ingress and Pokemon Go, is that the player has to go places in real life to have fun in the game, and one attraction of fantasy sandbox worlds is that you have mobility capabilities that are impossible in your real life.<p>In regular Minecraft, creative mode, you can fly and hover. This is extremely alluring to a kid who may otherwise only be able to ride a bicycle around their own boring subdivision neighborhood during daylight hours. Hey, it's even nice for people who have cars. If the kids have to beg Mom or Dad to drive them across town in the real world to mine virtual diamonds, that's not going to end up being fun for anybody.<p>People play games where they live, and if the AR game does not include people's homes as a legitimate place to play, then having fun includes some amount of inconvenience that sours it. Some people can tap a Pokestop or Portal from their bedroom or living room. Other people have to drive ten minutes to reach the nearest one.<p>The best I can come up with is that players use their mobile devices in the real world to mark their territory or drop warp points or exchange friend tokens or do discovery, and they can still build or explore the whole world from home. Geo-tagged photos might be able to update textures and geometry.<p>If someone builds a grand castle in the neighborhood park, that's not going to work in AR if you have to climb stairs that don't exist or go below ground when there is no real-world hole. But maybe you could see there is a castle there, through the discovery glass at the park, tap the block that grants your user read-only visitor access to it, and then go back home to climb the tower or explore the dungeons.<p>If someone else builds a different castle overlapping over the same territory, you can decide which user's construction appears in your personal sandbox.