Okay, so I’ve been messing around with Pokemon GO again lately, and you know how it has that AR mode where the little critters show up in your real-world surroundings? Well, it’s kinda cool at first, but it drains my phone’s battery like crazy, and sometimes it just gets a bit wonky. So I figured, there’s gotta be a way to turn this thing off.
First thing I did was start looking for any Pokemon around me. I spotted a wild Pokemon and entered the capture screen, that’s where the AR usually kicks in. Once I was in the encounter, I noticed a little slider button up in the top right corner that said ‘AR’. I tapped on that slider, I saw that slider moved from right to left, and the background turned into some generic grassy field instead of my messy living room. The Pokemon was just floating there in that game-generated background, all chill. I threw a Pokeball and caught the Pokemon easily.
But I wanted to dig deeper, see if there were any settings I could tweak. From the game’s main screen, I tapped the Pokeball icon at the bottom, which opened up the main menu. Over there, I found the little gear icon for settings in the top right corner, and I tapped on that. I scrolled down the settings list until I saw something that said “AR”. I tapped on that, and there it was a toggle for something called “Niantic AR (AR+)”.
I tapped that toggle to turn it off. Then, to make sure it worked across the board, I backed out of the settings and tried another encounter. This time, even before I hit the AR slider in the encounter, it was already showing the game background. It’s like that global setting overrides the individual encounter one.
So, after doing all that, I realized it’s actually pretty simple. You can either turn it off in each encounter by tapping that AR slider, or you can just go into the settings and turn off the “Niantic AR” thing, and you’re good to go. No more shaky camera, no more battery drain, just good old-fashioned Pokemon catching. Problem solved!
