by One of the more fascinating ideas Google has had for its Android operating system is Ingress, an augmented reality game that’s partially intended to let game enthusiasts enjoy their pastime while getting out into the real world. As AllThingsD reports, its current dedicated audience isn’t huge, but that isn’t stopping the software giant from bringing it to iOS sometime next year.
Essentially, Ingress places players in one of two teams–the Enlightened and the Resistance. Every week, Google releases clues about a mysterious piece of technology that drives a larger ongoing narrative, and players go out into the world and “claim” local landmarks for their side. Points are also scored by simply exploring, and by interacting with other players in both the real and virtual worlds.
The “small but passionate” audience apparently consists of hundreds of thousands of users on Android, and it’s been steadily expanding since Google launched the closed beta last November. Bringing that technology to Apple’s large audience would only increase the game’s numbers and benefit both companies in the long run.
Keep in mind that Niantic Labs, the Google-owned startup behind both Ingress and Field Trip, plans to use the knowledge they’ve learned to construct a platform for other developers who want to make location-based games. It especially helps that the team has access to Google’s already impressive location data library, which even now allows Google to “feed Ingress players a custom map of local landmarks that looks more like something out of The Matrix than Google Maps.”
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