Hanke founded Keyhole

Posted by Jma325 Jma325 over 6 months ago

Ingress, currently in invite-only beta on Android, is an augmented reality game that forces Neverwinter players to choose between two factions--the Enlightened and the Resistance--and then take to the physical streets and battle the opposing force for control of Portals set in real-world locations. Deploying virtual resonators and shields beefs up your own Portals, while hack attacks break down the opposition's strongholds. Portals in close proximity can be linked together to form Control Fields if your team controls them all, and the population count of the areas in a Control Field adds to your faction's global score.All of the action takes place on your smartphone screen, an augmented reality layered over a Google Maps-powered [url=http://www.nwgolds.com]Neverwinter Gold[/url] grid of local streets. Chat functions let you plan group maneuvers or taunt the enemy. (Resistance for life!)That's an ultra-basic description; the game is a lot more fun (and detailed) than that staid explanation.Making things even more interesting is the deep backstory Niantic has actively woven around the game, a tale of conspiracy and secret codes and mind-controlling Shapers from other dimensions, all propelled forward by the Niantic Project website, an Ingress YouTube Channel, and the Ingress and Niantic Project Google+ accounts. There are even Ingress books.Characters from the narrative frequently turn in up the real world, such as Misty Hannah and Klue S.'s recent appearance at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, the big Ingress battle at Google I/O, and the mysterious "Anomaly" event scheduled for June 7 in Cross Plains, Texas.Taken as a whole, Ingress is an awesome game, but beyond that, it's also an awesome experience if you drink deep from the universe Niantic has cultivated. Try it out if you can--you can request an invite on the Niantic Project website, beg a current Neverwinter player (like me!) for an invite, or ping the Ingress Google+ account with a creative request to try and crack open the door.It's hella fun, and it sprouted from very simple roots. Niantic head John Hanke wants you to go outside.Just go outside!"When we set up the Niantic group, the goal was to look at this intersection of mobile and location--and entertainment, to some extent--and try to build apps that would encourage people to get the most out of their city, or town, or of being outside," Hanke says.Exploring the intersection of location and mobility and technology--"ubiquitous computing," as it's often called--is nothing new for Hanke. Before leading up Niantic, he led product management for Google's "Geo" division of location-based services, and before that, Hanke founded Keyhole, a company that was eventually bought by Google and transformed into the seminal Google Earth."We want to encourage people to move and explore," Hanke continues. "Those higher-level goals inspired both Field Trip and Ingress--they kind of grew up together. They share some DNA."