Google's Ingress is a gold mine for augmented reality

The new game sees players do battle via smartphones as they roam their city?? but it's paving the way for something even more interesting

THERE'S a battle raging on Massachusetts Avenue. I'm hopelessly outnumbered, trying to take control of a patch of land at the edge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My fighter name is Spottiswoode. I try to seize control of the enemy portal, but get knocked back, losing health. They're too strong here.

This isn't real life. Well, not quite. I'm playing a game called Ingress, which sees players fighting for control of real-world landmarks or monuments - dubbed portals - in their cities. It was released as a mysterious, invite-only beta two weeks ago by a Google spin-off called Niantic Labs. It represents a big step towards ubiquitous, accurate augmented reality (AR), in which real-world objects are annotated with a virtual layer of information that is displayed on a smartphone's camera.

Ingress runs as an Android app, tied to the real world through GPS. You and your smartphone need to be within range of a portal to interact with it. "Exotic matter" (XM) is collected as you explore your town and allows you to take control of a portal. You can then link it with two other portals to create a triangle. Your side now "owns" that territory.

Right now, the area around MIT and Harvard University is a sea of green, the colour of the "Enlightened", with small pockets of blue-coloured "Resistance" up towards Medford and to the south near the Boston Red Sox's stadium. This mix of physical and virtual reality, using accurate location data to tie them together, places Ingress somewhere between a map and full-blown AR.

But it feels like more than just a fun new game. There are rumours that Google's much-hyped AR goggles, dubbed Project Glass, may launch in 2013. Vital to its success will be detailed info overlaid on what wearers see as they walk around outside. Even if the goggles don't emerge next year, a detailed record of where all the Ingress players wander - and the establishments they visit en route - is still a data gold mine for Google to use to improve its location-based services.

Players in less well-covered areas can also suggest that landmarks of interest to them should become new game portals by snapping a geotagged photo with their smartphone.

"This is classic Google," says Blair MacIntyre, director of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, Atlanta. "They may get information about new monuments, and that actually helps them generate more interesting search results, because these are the things that local people say are interesting."

Such photos will show buildings from many angles and could be used to create models that would help computer-vision systems recognise them later. This would help solve a major issue with current AR apps. "Accuracy is one of the biggest problems for AR," says Tobias H?llerer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The element missing in commercial products is computer vision."

So while Ingress isn't AR in its own right, its features pave the way for it. "It clearly has AR in mind," says H?llerer. "The data will be immensely valuable."

As I cycle home from work, I stop near a location I'd scouted out previously, one with a weak enemy portal. I attack, using built-up XM to destroy the enemy infrastructure before planting my own, surrounding the portal and turning it blue. On Ingress's built-in chat client, a player called Igashu praises my handiwork. "Good job, Spottiswoode," he says. I feel proud and move on, plotting my next assault upon the enemy's portals.

Virtual guide points out the sights

You can't beat having a local show you around their city, one who knows exactly where you are and points out fascinating details about your surroundings. Now a new smartphone app from Google called Field Trip aims to do just that. The app, only available on Android phones in the US for now, uses Wi-Fi or GPS to place you, then feeds you relevant information about your location, alerting you to interesting places as you pass near them.

The user decides how much or how little info they want, and alerts range from historical facts about buildings to reviews of restaurants and local money-off deals. For those behind the wheel, a driving mode announces details aloud.

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