TechStuff Classic: TechStuff Takes the Ingress

was launching in two thousand twelve. It's still around today, but I thought it'd be fun to go back and listen to Chris Pallette and I talked about the whole concept of this game back when it was brand new and just launching. So let's listen in today. We want to talk about an alternate reality game and a r G that uses augmented reality as well. It comes to us courtesy of a little company called Google and the like. Yeah.

They they've made a name for themselves in a few things, but yeah, they've created this game through a division called Neantic Labs UM and it's called Ingress, and it's interesting alternate reality game. But before we really get into the game itself, maybe we should talk and refresh our listeners memories about what an alternate reality game is. Now we've done an episode about alternate reality games, but that was back in two thousand nine when we were both so

young and idealistic. Sorry, um, yeah yeah, so yeah. The differences and augmented and alternate realities are in some ways kind of slight, well especially now, especially now. Um. An alternate reality is is one that is I would argue, very similar to ours, um, but there are significant differences. Um, you know you might have I think of that sort of in the in my head. This is sort of goes to the genre of alternate histories. Um, for example The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick,

in which the Axis won World War Two? What would the world be like? Um? You know, the countries are still there, the nationalities that that were familiar with, but things have changed substantially. That that's that's how I kind of get into that idea or the mindset that it sort of takes, because it could be something as simple as uh, you know, there are a lot of what

ifs there. You know, what if a different person had uh won the election, or what if a person hadn't been uh uh, had had gone to one university instead of another. What if? What if Lincoln had not been assassinated? What if? Yeah, there are a lot of what if type things. Alternate reality games in general, what they do is they use the they used the stuff around us in the real world as part of a game that is fictional. So you've got a fictional story taking place

within the context of the real world. Now, in some cases, the fictional story assumes that the players themselves are part of this fictional world. So you're playing a part you're not really you because um. One of the two of the games I always think about when I think of alternate reality games are two of the big, big early examples.

One was called The Beast, and that was the game that was partly a marketing um push for the movie AI Artificial Intelligence, uh, the Spielberg Kubrick film that that came out several years ago. Well, there was this this game that came out with it called The Beast that had a storyline that was uh tangential to the story

that takes place in AI. Some of the characters play a part a little bit within the realm of the game, and players were solving mysteries and trying to help fictional characters achieve goals within the context of the game, and they were all doing it in real time with real assets.

So you might get a phone call in the middle of the night from a character in this game, or you might get a fact or an email or a file of some sort, and you were supposed to act on it in a real way to push the game forward.

The other one that I always think about is called I Love Bees, which was part of the Halo universe, and it was again another marketing attempt to push Halo, but it it took a life of its own and became a game that people who had never intended to ever play in the Halo game became and you know, absolutely fascinated with this game. And again lots of different puzzles and uh things that you need to achieve. Often we will see these sort of games come up as

part of a marketing campaign. A lot of movies have done this. I remember when The Dark Knight came out, there was one was related to The Joker, and I remember getting very very upset because I I uncovered one of the clues and discovered exactly where I would need to go within Atlanta to get it, but I found out about forty minutes too late, and by the time I would have been able to get to the location, it had already been discovered, and I didn't get my

Joker custom bowling ball. This was that a bowling alley. Oh man, can you imagine a custom Joker bowling ball? Okay, that's pretty neat and it's pretty cool. So this is this is along those lines, but it also adds in the augmented reality angle, where uh, a large part of the participation with this game is going to depend upon people using devices, primarily smartphones. It's really meant for smartphones to interact with their environment in order to h to

push the game forward. Yeah, we've we've talked about both alternate reality games and augmented reality SOFT where in the past. UM Augmented reality is sort of like the heads up display that you would see in a fighter jet. UM. It's a layer of information that that a device will provide for you. It could be a tablet or um, you know, a smartphone something like that generally that you would carry with you. And so if you were looking through a an augmented reality device as you walk down

the street. You might see information about uh the businesses on the street around you, or for example, you might see a special going on at a cafe or um, you might find out where the cleanest bathroom is on the street. Don't laugh, there are people who who provide this information. Um, I am not laughing. I'm downloading apps. Yeah, I was gonna say. Um. And as a matter of fact, uh Neontic Labs has has already come out with a sort of augmented reality app UM that I have on

on my Android phone field field trip UM. Now on this particular in this particular case, you are not looking at the screen on the smartphone to see what the camera sees beyond having a layer of information superimposed on that, which is a good way to walk into obstacles that are not covered in your screen. By the way, avoid that. Um. This actually pops up little cards I've seen them called as as you happen to be near by something. It uses the GPS um in your smartphone or I assume

tablet uh Android tablet. That again, field Trip is one of those those apps that's it's optimized for smartphones. Yeah, it tells you right there on the app like it's it's intended for smartphones that will run on tablets, but it's intended for smartphones well generally, because it's it's using the GPS and your communications network to identify where you are and give you information about stuff, and you can control how much of that information use. See you might

watch what type of information. Yeah, there there are lots and lots of sources, um, different restaurant review sites, um, places of interest, historical points of interest, those kinds of things. That's what I have turned on mind. So it's it's kind of fun too to be driving around in Atlanta and have a little alert come up and say, hey, you're near uh you know, of course here in Atlanta we've had civil war battles shore and they'll tell you

points of interest just down the road. Here is where so and so, uh you know ran you know, in in conflict and they set up camp just down the street. It's interesting, It's no, it's really cool that it gives you that that extra information about the world you are in. And I love that idea. I mean, I've and this is one of those things that you can kind of see playing a larger role with Google. Other Google projects,

mainly Project glass. Yes, the idea of wandering around your world and getting information about your world that you would you know that that that's accessible, but you would have to look for it otherwise. But now it's just coming up. So if you are interested in things like history and you are visiting a city or even just walking around your own city, you may end up learning things about your the place you're in that you never would have

known before. And uh, and it's it really does try to bridge that gap between the digital world and the physical world, which is something I've always been interested in. And as augmented reality applications become more prevalent, it's becoming it's becoming a real I think this is something that we can do right now. UM, go ahead. I'm sorry, I just wanted to mention exactly what project glasses um, you know, because we didn't really talk about that. Uh.

That's UM. It's still sort of an experimental product I would consider or unit or or really cutting edge. It's it's on the verge of being produced, but only in limited quantities because it's sort of a first generation thing or zero point eight generation UM. And that's a a project that Google has been working on. UM that it's

it's not. It uses a frame, glasses, frame and a small piece of glass that, um, a user would be able to see augmented reality information on the kind of thing that you would currently use by looking at your smartphone. But um, you know, it would tell you where places are around you, it would be able to make phone calls and um uh you know, record video. As a

matter of fact, that's how they unveiled it. They had somebody wearing a project glass, um set of glasses and walking through and they you could see what they were seeing as they were they were walking through and they I think somebody skydived, didn't they. Yeah, that was that

the Google Io event. They had a team of skydivers who who wore the the glasses as they were skydiving and then handed them off to uh some some stunt bicyclists who then handed it off who some folks who repelled down the side of the building, who then handed it off to more bicyclists who then biked the pair of glasses up to the stage to serage brand as I recall, and yeah, it was. It was. It was a big spectacle and it really spectacle. Man. I'm gonna hit you and anyway, the yeah, it was, it was

an interesting demonstration of the of the technology. Well, anyway, all of this kind of leads up to Ingress. So Ingriss is coming for that same group within Google Niantic Labs, which is you know that they are kind of an R and D group in a way, and the game it has several different elements to it. And we can only speak in fairly vague terms because neither Chris nor I are part of this game yet. We it's as of the recording of this podcast, it's in beta and

we are not in the beta testing yet. We have both applied for it, so we're hoping to have that change soon, but as we're recording this, we do not have access to it. It's been again, as the record of this podcast, active for about fifteen days. Yeah, yeah, and I think it really wasn't wasn't really well known until probably as of the day we're recording is probably only a couple or or three days. I didn't see anything in the media about it until a day or

two before we recorded this podcast. Like a lot of alternate reality games, Google started to seed every the world with hints of the game from months ago, but they're now just starting to coalesce into something we can talk about now. Some of the seeds started off over at

Comic Con. Yeah, at San Diego Comic Con there was a person who was taking on the role of a character named Tycho, and Tycho is an artist in this, uh, the world that has been created for Ingress, and I guess we can kind of give a little bit of an overview. If you were to go to Google Play, which is where their store is, and to try and download the Ingress andrew It app, you would see this description. Ingrish transforms the real world into the landscape for a

global game of mystery, intrigue, and competition. Our future is at stake, and you must choose a side. A mysterious energy has been unearthed by a team of scientists in Europe. The origin and purpose of this force is unknown, but some researchers believe it is influencing the way we think. We must control it or it will control us. The enlightened seek to embrace the power that this energy may bestow upon us. The resistance struggle to defend and protect

what's left of our humanity. So part of Ingriss involves choosing a side being either part of the Enlightened or part of the resistance, and competing for resources by walking around and moving around in the real world and and UH collecting resources through the smartphone application. That's part of the game. We're gonna hit pause on the Game of Ingress for just a moment to take this word from our sponsor. The other part of the game involves puzzles

that are released through various venues. UH. In some cases, you may be looking at a physical sign that has a QR code that leads you to a puzzle, or you might see there might be an ad for something that Google, either from Google or maybe from one of Google's partners that includes a clue that goes into this game. The idea being that parts of the game are all around us all the time, and that by paying attention we can we can see them and and push the

story forward. So right now, the the main place for those game elements is on a website called Niantic project dot com. It's in I A, N T, I C for Niantic or neanticu and anyway, that's where the progress gets tracked and you can actually go from the very beginning of the game, which is November one as of officially it's November one, and work your way up and

it all start revealing more information. You can start seeing codes that you can break, things like that, and uh, there are also some wikies that have popped up already of players who are really passionate about this kind of stuff, who are dedicated to gathering as much information as possible and then posting it on these wikis. So you can actually find people who are already neck deep in this game. And some of them probably don't even have the smartphone

app yet. They're not they're only participating in the part that they can over the web. But once the smartphone app becomes more widely distributed, then you'll see people um using that. Part two and the way the smartphone app stuff works is kind of interesting. Did you read about this.

I read some about it. Yeah, alright, So the ideas that there are these things called portals that are scared around the real world and you use those portals the other portals, well, before you ask, yeah, it's not not not aperture Science portals UM or black Mesa for that matter. Now, you use your smartphone to identify where these portals are, and you at playing as a member of whatever side, whichever side you've chosen, you go and you try to

secure these portals. And by securing various portals within the game, and this actually requires you to move physically from one location to another, usually on foot. Want to understand, um, then you start to solidify your side's presence in whichever city you happen to be in. Okay, So let's say that there's like I don't know, let's say there's a hundred portals within a few neighborhoods of where you are. I mean, I have no idea what the dead state

actually is, depending upon you know where it is. They do say that there's going to be a lot more interaction and have more heavily populated places. Sure, so cities are more likely to have a lot going on. So moving around, you know, just by moving around and following the directions on the gap, you can start to secure portals. Actually getting to a portal is step one. Then you have to hack the portal. Yes, what actually involves in hackey, I don't know. I haven't had a chance to play,

do you do you well? From what I understand, um, and I'm trying not to to bring us back to real reality too much. But from what I understand, portals are basically places of interest, um, which would kind of go with you know that the current m O of Niantic Labs. Yeah, if you look at some of the there's a video in particular where there's a guy who is complaining about cell phone he bought from an auction and he says, look, it seems to work. But when I walk up to the statue and hold up the phone,

this weird screen comes up. And it's this this very odd screen that shows up. And also if you pay attention, in the background, there's a man in black watching. Yeah, but but yeah, it's it's That's kind of the idea, is that that when you get to these places of interest, weird stuff happens, and there's probably some sort of mini game I would imagine in the smartphone that allows you

to hack. Yeah, I understand that that hacking is essentially a check in at that portal, like four square, Facebook places that kind and I imagine it will be sort of a combination of um, something simple that you know, it doesn't frustrate people too awfully much. You know, you don't you don't want to set the barrier too high or you end up with a very small group of players, But you don't want to set too low or people

lose interest very quickly. So yeah, it's a delicate and people who have run alternate reality games probably have a lot to say about this, about how what you know all the challenges that are involved in designing and running one of these games. It's got to be pretty monumental. But but you do collect energy along the way. Yes, uh, it was an exotic material or x M. Yes it's not the Satellite Radio company. No, this exotic material. I like to think of it like pac Man pellets. Yeah,

that's the I've seen it described. So what I thought, You don't actually have to you don't. You don't know if you actually see the balls of energy or something like that, but I think you walk. As you walk, you collected. If you look at the map on your smartphone through INGRISS, it will show where the little XM dots are, and as you get close to them, it

collects them for you, those x M dots. That energy also kind of counts as your health because sometimes when you're hacking these portals, some of them are boomy trapped and they if the booby trap goes off, then you take you take damage within the game, so you have to collect more exotic material, and if you have been walking around a certain part of town quite a bit for you, there may not be very much exotic material life.

You have to go to some other location that you have not you know, scoured, so that you can collect it, whereas someone else who's just playing the game, they might be able to find exact material. Because part of this game is to get people out and about and exploring their environments and interacting with their environments and not just you know, passively playing a game at home. Hey, it's Jonathan from two thousand nineteen again, um interrupting Jonathan from

two thousand and twelve. That's just a wild guess. I don't know where tarr is gonna put this ad break, but just based on statistics, it's more likely she's interrupting me than Chris. Anyway, we're gonna take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsor. So there's there's this part where you are trying to discover hack and control these portals, and as you control more portals, you can link them together and strengthen your position Meanwhile, the

opposing team is trying to do the same thing. And there will be times where you'll have a portal under your team's control and then through a coordinated effort, the other team rests it away from you, and then you have to figure out how you're gonna get it back within the context of the game. And meanwhile, you still have this other mystery going on between the two factions where they're they're really talking about this exotic material, what it's doing, why is it here, and is it a

good thing or not? And bits and pieces of that mystery are going to play out over time, and in fact, from what I understand a Google they're talking about it lasting about a year and a half. Yeah, yeah, so it will end um, and they've made it clear that that it will end UM. So yeah, this this will be an interesting experiment to see, uh, you know, the kind of thing that that can be done with with

these games on this scale. Because at the moment um UH the app is only available for Android devices, which make up the majority of the market at least here in the United States, UM, but it will also be available for iOS UH smartphones. The Apple operating system that runs the iPhone um, so you know there, this is the kind of thing that that's going to be available

to quite a few people. And the more they get involved with it, um, you know that the more interesting it will get just to see how how well it does. But it'll be um. And it may also end up being a source of revenue for Google to rite. They've partnered with some companies. Uh, and there may be some advertising or cross promotional stuff going on through the app that will generate revenue. Uh. They may also eventually have

other ways of generating revenue through this besides advertising. But advertising is certainly something that could be part of this, and it wouldn't surprise me at all. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're following the path to the portal and you're like, huh, it's amazing. This massive portal that's going to be key to the success of my faction is right here at this Jamba Juice yes, which is one of their partners. Yes, yes, And you'll say, hey,

this portal is hacked. This portal that I'm here, it's smoothie Yeah. Yeah, I mean, but I mean there's you know there. They have to be able to fund the stuff or else there's no stuff, right, so I don't I don't really object to that. It's it's as long as it's handled well. So and it'll Since we haven't been able to play yet, we aren't really sure how it's handled. True, I would hope it's handled pretty well. But it'll also be interesting to see how the mystery

plays out. And I'm sure we're going to see more and more instances of real world stuff, uh playing into this game. For instance, Like like when I mentioned Tycho, I didn't really get into it. But the thing they did at Comic Con was this guy, Tycho, who is a character within the world of Ingress, who is this artist who has had visions and has developed art based

on those visions that have hidden messages in them. Not not that hidden actually if you look, if you look at it for more than a second, but anyway, he's developed these these images, he's developed these posters, um and he's known as Tycho. Well, he showed up as Tycho at Comic Con, like he was. It was Tycho who was there, this guy who then started to shout out

stuff relating to this game during a panel. And this was all planned, It was all all pre orchestrated, but he was shouting out this this weird information and then eventually is carded off by security and so, um, it was all part of the game. But at the time, that was one of the earliest, um examples of the information from the game getting out there into the public, and a lot of people whould have no idea what it was all about. They were just they'd hear this

and dismiss it as well. That was that guy was nuts, And maybe people who you know, there might be two or three people in the audience who are like, I wonder what that was all about and start looking into it, and that would just be the very beginning of the trail. I'm sure we'll see more of that, Like at at big conferences, they'll probably be things that play into this. I'm gonna be going to c E S. I don't necessarily think we'll see anything there, but if we do,

that'd be pretty cool. Yeah, And it's um it's possible too that that someone else will gobble up a lot of the XM before you get there. Well yeah, I mean, mostly what I want to see is just the actual physical event play out in front of me, because I mean I've I've I've played in these games, these types of games before, where I've taken part with problems, solving

teams and trying to decipher messages, things like that. Uh, and I've played from behind a screen, but I've never been to one of the ones that has a physical gathering or or you know, something happens at another event that plays into the game. I've never actually witnessed one of those. I've heard about them, and I've seen video and stuff, but I've never been at one. So something I would actually like to experience, just to see, you know,

how is that handled? I mean, part of that is because I love games, part of it's because I'm an actor as well, and part of it because I just love technology and seeing those those worlds of acting and technology come together to produce something really compelling is a lot of fun. So I'm curious which side are you going to choose, Dude, enlightened, I'm all about grabbing that power and using it to subjugate others to my will.

I feel I haven't decided yet. Resistance is useless. What's funny is that I've on on some of the articles that I've read in the last couple of days and most of them are have about the same amount of information. And since this this is still very new, um, there are commenters who are have completely in their heads I guess, joined up and they're arguing on the you know, the comments on these different forums saying, you know, well, the interesting thing is these games and land can really start

off some truly uh truly interesting conversations, philosophical conversations. I mean the The The Beast had an element in it where they were discussing the idea of artificially intelligent beings and whether or not they should be given the right to vote. And there was a real debate, and there was actually a vote held within the context of the game, and all the players in the game could vote on the issue of whether or not AI constructs should be

given the right to vote. And I was in one of the very vocal members of that community arguing for one of the signs. Can you guess which one I would? I would be thinking that you'd want them to I argued against voting. Really, I said they should not. I said, first of all, giving AI sentience was a mistake, and that too, to continue down that road was a horrible idea, and it was just going to lead to our own uh extinction down the line, and therefore you don't give

a toaster the right to vote. That was my that was my motto. I figured in the confusion, you would try to take control. No, no, that's ridiculous, there's no no. Robots are too strong and they're more than meets the eye. So I was not for that anyway. It'll be interesting to see where Ingris goes. Uh, And once we have access to it, I'm sure we'll play a play it.

And probably mentioned it a couple of times. So these games are becoming a lot more widespread though in knowledge, and I think this is gonna do a lot for that.

Plus I think they're becoming a lot more sophisticated. They have to be, because, as I was saying to Chris beforehand, it's gotten to the point now where when a game like this comes out and people have the chance to play, you have such a wide base of people with such a wide range of skills and knowledge that it is really difficult to design a puzzle that will last more than like half an hour under scrutiny and within there were puzzles that I looked at that completely confused me

back at the I Love Bees game, and then other people would take one look at because their brains work in a different way than mind do. They'd say, Oh, I bet that that's a topographical map and that the colors relate back to elevations. And I was looking at like I was just counting how many yellow blocks there were. So I mean, that's the kind of thing, though, is that you get enough people there and all of them think in different ways. There are ties where I was

solving puzzles that other people were completely confused about. Um, it's a huge challenge to the people running the game. That wraps up this classic tech Stuff episode. Tech Stuff takes the Ingress. As I said at the beginning, Ingress is still being played today. They did a major update in late two thousand seventeen early two thousand eighteen, and you can still download the game and play it. The update ended up changing some of the narrative backstory for Ingress.

I haven't been playing for quite some time, but the company behind Ingress also created a couple of other notable alternate reality games, including Pokemon Go. So if you've played Pokemon Go, you two have played a game designed by the people behind ingress. Well. That wraps up this episode. If you have any suggestions for future, brand new episodes

of tech Stuff, reach out to me. You can send an email to tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or send me a message on Facebook or Twitter, or the handle at both of those is text Stuff hs W. Pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find an archive to all of our past episodes, as well as a link to our online store, and every purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again soon.

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