Have you ever heard about the augmented reality game Ingress? I am quite sure you have, cause even in German's morning TV show, they have talked about it and showed how this new kind of game is changing the behavior of nerds, usually sitting at their computer desk and starring at flat screens.
This is a german morning magazin on TV
The game is played in the real world, if you are not cheating by using some GPS tools to make your smartphone think, you are somewhere in the real world. So the only way you can play it, is by going outside, checking the smartphone display regularly and looking for portals. Portals can be hacked and occupied. If you own a portal you can even link it to other portals. And by linking portals you can even create so called fields to occupy mind units for your faction. Oh by the way, there are two fraction playing against each other. Some call it frogs and smurfs, but in the game they are called The Enlightened and The Resistance. And as you may have guessed, they are green or blue in the game.
The game is very dynamic and because the portals have to be defied against the opponent party, you always have to be on the move and form groups working together closely to watch your fields. I have recently tried the game to see, how this all works out.
Imagine you are living in a parallel world, where you can see XM, portals, resonators and more. Nobody else can see it, without having the game on his smartphone and looking at the screen. This is quite silly sometimes, because you start looking around, if you see other agents playing the game. Everybody looking at their smartphone could be an agent, but you still do not know, if she is enlightened or in the resistance.
But strolling around looking at the smartphone is not so exciting as it could be. If you have seen the spot by Volkswagen about their new smilage campaign, you can see, that there are many parts working together quite nicely. You just connect you smartphone to the car and you can start your road trip. The app has the ability to connect in multiple people, combining their photos, milage, checkins, comments and the like, into a Smileage score. I really wonder how much from the experience of Google Field Trip app, which is available only in the US right now, can enhance the Smileage application, being on the road. This aggregates everything from your trip into a cool map experience, similar to Google+ events, where you can share photos from the event from all participants, who share their images with the event. And of course don't miss out Google Now, displaying the weather, traffic, nearby offers and more.
So how about combining Google's Project GLASS with the experience of Smileage or even better with Ingress. Google Glass's API is designed to get cards pushed from a server application to the Google Glass. So showing portals, resonators and XM floating around could be easily projected into your view with Google Glass. And as with the ability of Google Glass to take a video or make a picture, you could also hack a portal or deploy resonators and fire some arms to portals occupied by the enemy. Glass would be a really nice experience for lots of stuff, that could pass your way in the real world.
