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Act like a child without judgement and chase pigeons in this AR app

Act like a child without judgement and chase pigeons in this AR app

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Feed them, then chase them

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Do you hate pigeons? If you hate them as much as I do and live in a city full of them, you might find that chasing after them means getting weird frowns. Fortunately, there’s a new app called Pigeon Panic that promises to let you do that (relatively) frown free. It makes use of Apple’s ARKit on iOS 11 that has seen a raft of cool apps come out, including one that lets you put Ikea furniture on the street.

The premise of Pigeon Panic is simple: you throw random bits of food like pizza, donuts, and other greasy bits of goodness indiscriminately at the screen to attract the virtual birds. Once they congregate like the filthy flying rats they are, you scare them off by running into them. The quicker you do so, and the more you attract and scare, the higher your score.

Chasing hoards of virtual pigeons actually does feel kind of relaxing, and nowhere near as stressful or dangerous (in terms of being pooped on) as Piazza San Marco in Venice. The app was created by a studio in London called Combo, which was looking into building an experience that would only work in AR.

“In cities like London especially, being seen running into pigeons and making them fly away is pretty frowned upon if you're over the age of four,” Sam Piggott, co-founder of Combo told The Verge in an e-mail, “so we thought we'd simulate and gamify the whole experience to bring it to an audience young and old."

Pigeon Panic is available on the Apple App Store for free. Just make sure you don’t run into anything while looking at your phone.