
A Google Surprise — Worldwide Alternative Reality Game Ingress Revealed - raphar
http://singularityhub.com/2012/11/17/a-google-surprise-worldwide-alternative-reality-game-ingress-revealed/
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koopajah
There was a long discussion on HN on friday, you can find it here :
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4788902>

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JeremyKolb
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>

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205guy
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.

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xor-ed-wolf
Oh, well, even if they won't it'll be implemented at some point in AR-enabled
software anyway. _wrote it to the notebook_

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ck2
Must be amazing with google glasses.

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Lexarius
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.

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StavrosK
Can you spare an invite, good sir?

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Lexarius
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.

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StavrosK
I will, thank you.

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DGCA
[http://widget00.mibbit.com/?settings=ba98b0e263309da29de2045...](http://widget00.mibbit.com/?settings=ba98b0e263309da29de2045992f403c4&server=webchat.irchighway.net&nick=&channel=%23invites)

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

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JulianMorrison
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.

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

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

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

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mtgx
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.

