Tim Cook is surprisingly confident about the promise of augmented reality

Today, on Apple’s quarterly earnings call with financial analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook spent some time talking up augmented reality (AR). Apple doesn’t have any existing hardware or software for that technology at the moment, so it was surprising to hear Cook talk about the subject.

He brought it up in the context of the Pokémon Go mobile game (or, as he called it, “PokéMan“), in response to a question about the business value of Apple Pay. In case you’ve been living under a giant Charmander, and you haven’t had the pleasure of playing it, Pokémon Go is different from many mobile games because it superimposes Pokémon creatures on top of whatever is in front of you, using the camera on your mobile device. So it looks like the characters exist in real life, and you have to catch them. This is an implementation of AR, and you can approve mobile payments for things like PokéCoins with Apple Pay.