So the next step is wearables, and Hanke is already toying with the idea of using Google Glass for Ingress. After all, Field Trip already has Glass support, so why not this?
"I think at some point we will [launch on Glass]," he says. "Games are the most common thing that people report doing on their mobile phones today. They're definitely part of mobile phone adoption so I would expect them to be part of wearable adoption too. And I think alternate reality games are the way to go."
Hanke acknowledge other possible avenues for augmented reality, one of which is Google's Project Tango, a phone capable of tracking 3D motion of of users and the environment around them.
"To take it even further in terms of location and accuracy and rendering things on top of the real world you could look at something like Project Tango, which basically creates a 3D point cloud through the device that then creates a 3D map which can precisely locate your information to within centimetres so you can overlay things onto the view accurately.
"That is getting at one of the key problems for AR which is creating these very detailed 3D maps of the world."
In fact, Hanke's generally quite enthused when we ask him for his thoughts on Tango. "I think it's amazing. It's a really hard thing that they're trying to do and it works rawly well. What would be needed for widespread AR applications would be lots of people using devices like Tango to build up that 3D map so you can do more stuff with it.
"Just having the phone being able to [find] your location to that level of precision [would be great]. GPS gets you down to 10 maybe 5 metres at best but that kind of technology can get your position down to centimetres. You could build a game that could cause a robot that would rise up out of this table and attack you in a convincing way. If it knew the 3D dimensional shape of the room then you could create experiences like that, which would be pretty cool."
- Augmented reality: is it time to get excited again?
