Visitors Now:
Total Visits:
Total Stories:

By Truth Is Treason (Reporter)
Contributor profile | More stories

Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

Ingress, Keyhole, and the CIA: Google’s New Augmented Reality Video Game

Monday, November 19, 2012 18:50

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

Kevin Hayden – TruthisTreason.net

Source: Cryptogon (Video trailer below)

John Hanke is the head of Niantic Labs, the Google unit that created Ingress, a new global augmented reality game.

Let’s quickly look at some of what Hanke was up to before he worked at Google.

After graduation from the University of Texas at Austin, Hanke, “Worked in foreign affairs for the US Government in Washington, DC and Southeast Asia.” Nice and vague. *wink* *wink*

Hanke went on to become the CEO of Keyhole, Inc., a company that specialized in geospatial data visualization and had multiple connections to the black world. Keyhole, Inc. received financial backing from the CIA (via In-Q-Tel). Google acquired Keyhole, Inc. and the associated technologies became Google Earth, Google Maps, and other Google services.

This is relatively bland so far, I know, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide if any of the following is strange, given Hanke’s long association with the U.S. Government.

It might be helpful to keep Secrets in Plain Sight in mind as you wade into this one.

In Ingress, Google wants people to be physically present at the locations that are in the game to confront, “A mysterious energy,” and to, “Choose a side.”

“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.

Fabian Bustamante, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering, has looked at using the type of technology used in Ingress for what he calls, “Soft control.”

He stated, “We can ‘soft control’ users with gaming or social network incentives to drive them where we want them.”

What’s going on here?

Rather than trying to guess about what might be happening here, I’m going to have to simply bask in the weirdness of this one for a while.

Via: IGN: