The augmented reality game Ingress transforms the real world into a global playing field, in which you interact via a smartphone app with the environment. After operational for more than a year in beta, Google’s Niantic Labs has announced the public availability of its location-based game Ingress game in Android platform.

Ingress launched in November 2012 and was initially available only through a registration and an unlock code. The beta phase saw more than million downloads, where the augmented-reality games overlay a fictional virtual environment atop the real world. The real-time, location-based mobile Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game boasts players across the globe. Ingress officially went into a sort of open beta back in October of this year and Niantic Labs announced at that time the official version would be announced in December.

Niantic Labs finished the finale of the 9-week, 39-city global event known as Operation #13MAGNUS. The game had two events running simultaneously in San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Sao Paulo, and San Diego, with thousands of gamers turning out over the course of the day.

Agents in more than 200 countries around the world competed and collaborated to claim the Shards and move them across countries, continents and oceans to reach their goal, said Google’s Niantic Labs.

“Gaming and real-life meetups are really coming together. I can’t say we predicted how popular the live meetups would be,” John Hanke, vice president in charge of Niantic Labs told VentureBeat. “We didn’t anticipate the degree to which people would go to live events to meet people they didn’t already know. The game is a social icebreaker.”

The game

Ingress is a smart phone game for Android, which combines a fictional story with our real world. Google Glass for example is a pioneer of this technology. The players try to conquer it portals that are spread all over the world and learning along the way to know their city better.

The story is simple–two teams compete for territories, anywhere in the world. Because humans cannot agree on how to deal with this potential threat it splits into two camps: the Enlightened and the Resistance. The player must decide at the beginning of an alliance and cannot change this.

The goal is to conquer the entire world. For that, players need portal and these are mostly of interest or other prominent landmarks, mostly in big cities and rural areas. The players have to fight the portals by using their smartphones. While the Resistance afraid of these mysterious energies and want to fight at all costs and get rid of that Enlighted have the opposite goal: you will see the energy as a potentially important for the future of all humanity and want to use this and promote the spread.

Ingress chases you out of the chair and drives the user through the streets. The game is played in a mixture of real world and online world. The playing area is your home town or the place it is at the guys up to now. To you move on the map, you have to move you in the real world–using GPS and Wi-Fi your position is determined.

Platform set for other AR games

It became known that the developers of Niantic Labs intend to implement a whole platform for Ingress augmented reality games. Their plan is to use a variety of operating time and the elements to create a series of Ingress API, through which third-party developers can create their own game projects.

Ingress goal is to create open real-world gaming platform, says John Hanke, who helped create Google Earth.

“You can think of Ingress in some ways as a proof of concept,” says Hanke. “With Ingress we’ve proven that people can have fun, that there’s a kernel of something powerful in a game that gets you out moving. And Ingress is just one example of the type of game in that genre that you could build.”

Some aspects of Ingress will almost surely be part of any platform: location data, a communications layer to let players interact, and in-game advertising tools that would allow Google to share revenues with developers. “The idea is that we would like to explore this concept of sponsors essentially being able to get exposure across a wide number of titles, but have a consolidated entry point for them,” Hanke says.

Niantic Labs is working on tools for developers that can be used to create AR-games with chat, position determination and the ability to embed advertising. Niantic does not announce the release date and emphasizes that the timing depends on the flexibility of a finite set of tools. If third-party programmers eventually get a good development environment, a lot of other interesting projects with the use of AR will emerge including Ingress release for iOS.