You probably don't recognise John Hanke by name, but as the man who developed the first versions of Google Earth, Maps and Street View, you've probably come across his work. You may have also stumbled on his latest project for Google's Niantic Labs startup, Ingress - an augmented reality app that transforms the world into a massive online multiplayer game. Years may have passed but Hanke's still thinking in maps.
Niantic Labs is an internal team focused entirely on mobile. Its first project was Field Trip, a neat little travel app that alerts users when they're near a point of interest. In a sense, it was a prequel to Ingress.
Two years later and Ingress saw general release on Android, and now (four million downloads later) Niantic Labs has just launched an iOS version in the hope of pulling in a tonne more users. The game itself consists of players locating "portals" hidden inside real-world artefacts - public works of art, landmarks - as they work with other members of their team to link these portals together and create a virtual triangle which "captures" that geographical area. It's a giant turf war with a sci-fi twist.
"It's a little World or Warcraft, a little geocaching," Hanke tells TechRadar. "Combine them, throw in a little JJ Abrams and that's Ingress".
There are now over 2 million of these portals spread around the globe, but they keep on growing: players can submit new locations from their neighbourhood to be considered for portal status. "In most places where people live you'll find portals within a relatively short walk or bike ride. People are playing in over 200 countries," says Hanke. "Even if it's a unique local ship that doesn't exist anywhere else, that can be considered a portal."
Who wins the world?
The aim is to win control of as much of the planet as possible, but to keep things interesting Ingress launches periodic mini stories with objectives of their own. One of these saw the teams having to move an item from one portal to another. Team Jarvis needed to get theirs to San Francisco, for team Ada it was Argentina.
"You can imagine the level of chatter, communication, people jumping in cars and running off to other cities," says Hanke. "A huge amount of the game play of Ingress happens [on people's phones]."
Ingress has already scooped up a big hardcore following in its short time on Earth. Hanke even shows us pictures of people who have tattooed themselves with their team emblem. "We have people saying to us over and over again - and it sounds crazy to say it in a conference room such as this - 'Ingress changed my life. I was in a rut or I was just going to work and going home and all of a sudden I'm discovering new parts of the city, I'm meeting new people, I feel better'. We've had more than 30 people get tattoos of the game logo."
Hanke used to create ways of seeing the world around us, now he's encouraging people to go out and learn more about it. Sure, planet Earth might lack the artistic ambition of Rapture and some of the every-present threats of Fallout's Wasteland, but augmenting our own reality is one thing phone can offer gamers that their consoles can't. And it's good for you.
"It changes the chemicals in your body when you go for a walk or a bike ride or a run. Endorphins get released and you feel good. The same thing when you have a face to face reaction with a person. So I think that's a huge thing going for these kinds of games. They get people moving and they encourage people to get together in real life. People are forming true friendships through the game… I think people are hungry for that."
But the problem augmented reality has right now is that it's still a little too intrusive. Picking up your phone and seeing some words on a screen isn't the most natural-feeling way to mess with the fabric of our perceived universe.
Wearable avenue
So the next step is wearables, and Hanke is already toying with the idea of using Google Glass for Ingress. After all, Field Trip already has Glass support, so why not this?
"I think at some point we will [launch on Glass]," he says. "Games are the most common thing that people report doing on their mobile phones today. They're definitely part of mobile phone adoption so I would expect them to be part of wearable adoption too. And I think alternate reality games are the way to go."
Hanke acknowledge other possible avenues for augmented reality, one of which is Google's Project Tango, a phone capable of tracking 3D motion of of users and the environment around them.
"To take it even further in terms of location and accuracy and rendering things on top of the real world you could look at something like Project Tango, which basically creates a 3D point cloud through the device that then creates a 3D map which can precisely locate your information to within centimetres so you can overlay things onto the view accurately.
"That is getting at one of the key problems for AR which is creating these very detailed 3D maps of the world."
In fact, Hanke's generally quite enthused when we ask him for his thoughts on Tango. "I think it's amazing. It's a really hard thing that they're trying to do and it works rawly well. What would be needed for widespread AR applications would be lots of people using devices like Tango to build up that 3D map so you can do more stuff with it.
"Just having the phone being able to [find] your location to that level of precision [would be great]. GPS gets you down to 10 maybe 5 metres at best but that kind of technology can get your position down to centimetres. You could build a game that could cause a robot that would rise up out of this table and attack you in a convincing way. If it knew the 3D dimensional shape of the room then you could create experiences like that, which would be pretty cool."
- Augmented reality: is it time to get excited again?
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