A Google Surprise — Worldwide Alternative Reality Game Ingress Revealed | Hacker News Reader

A Google Surprise — Worldwide Alternative Reality Game Ingress Revealed

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31 pointsraphar17 comments

There was a long discussion on HN on friday, you can find it here : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4788902

I wrote an article about the purpose of the game. Why it was built. you can check it out here if you like: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4805229

Yep. Just about every project by google has crowd-sourcing of data gathering/training data all over it. That's why they're currently the ultimate machine learning company around.

I came here to say exactly the same thing. My thought was they were going to be collecting WiFi info. Anyone know if that is even possible (I guess everything is possible, since they created the platform)? Hadn't thought of the pedestrian info angle. Also love JulianMorrison's comment that takes it to the meta-level: automated game generation based on the Gplex's needs.

Also how long until players must visit Brand X store as part of the game. Probably won't be so obvious, but say a target is right next to Brand X store, and then gameplay pauses for 15 minutes.

Oh, well, even if they won't it'll be implemented at some point in AR-enabled software anyway. wrote it to the notebook

I'm not sure I buy the augmented reality angle - the hype-generating marketing adverts seem to imply it, but nobody who's playing it has mentioned anything about AR - just a GPS- and map-based game. Augmented reality is when you use things like the phone position and orientation to overlay graphics onto a camera-view of the real world, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2jSzmvm_WA&feature=play...

As such I doubt it has much to do with Google Glass specifically - more likely I suspect they're tracking people walking around as they play to build a massively improved pedestrian-route database for a new pedestrian (and in-building, for places like malls, museums, etc) version of Google Maps: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/138res/google_launc...

Must be amazing with google glasses.

It might eventually be, but right now it's just an overlay on Google Maps. Now if you'll excuse me, some alien scum are attacking my Health Science Library.

Can you spare an invite, good sir?

Players aren't getting any invite quota yet, so I have none. I would recommend hanging around their IRC channel. That's where I got mine.

I will, thank you.

http://widget00.mibbit.com/?settings=ba98b0e263309da29de2045...

That's the invite channel. Read up on your lore, first.

Somewhere in the brightly lit but somehow still dark recesses of Google, I am sure someone is writing a program right now that algorithmically generates games in order to distribute real world tasks onto humans. Just give it a spec in some map-reduce type query language, and up pops a new game on the Android store.

Ah, that idea to gamify real work. It was there for ages but still so difficult to implement.

So the Daemon has started its darknet. However unlike the book version, this one wants to enslave instead of setting us free.

Doesn't work to me... it just shows the booting screen, then it does nothing.

I was starting to lose faith in augmented/alternate reality apps picking up. But Google has nailed it here, and at a time when ARM chips are starting to be able to easily handle this sort of stuff, too, like with OpenCL and higher GPU performance. It also seems to be at least one of the "killer apps" of Google Glass.

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