The latest update to the hugely popular mobile game Pokémon Go aims to prevent trainers catching Pokémon while driving.
The new feature picks up when a player is travelling above a speed possible by the average human on-foot, sends an in-app notification and asks the player to confirm if they are driving.
Reports of accidents caused by people who take their eyes of the road when a rare creature is spotted on their smartphone screens have come in from Singapore, Australia and the US.
The feature is a warning and allows the driver to bypass the notification if they wish, by saying they are a passenger, even when they are not.
The free-to-play location-based augmented reality mobile game is available in the US, Canada, the UK, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong and Australia.
Last week, the company announced it is now available in 15 new countries across Asia and the Oceania, although not China or India yet.
However, this has not stopped people side-loading the app and playing it in other countries, such as South Africa.
Other features in the updated version of 0.33.0 for Android and 1.3.0 for iOS devices include improvements to the accuracy of a curveball throw, fixes to bugs that previously prevented points for good throws, the ability to change a username once and the re-enablement of the battery-saver mode.
The previous update did away with a tracking feature which showed when Pokémon were around the user and used footprints to represent how near or far the creature was.
The developers said in a statement they are testing a variation of the "Nearby Pokémon" feature with a subset of users.
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