As the changes from Google’s Alphabet restructure continue to emerge, it today was revealed that Niantic Labs, the team behind popular Ingress augmented reality game, will be spun off as its own independent company. In addition to creating Ingress, Niantic Labs also created Field Trip, which will also stick around when the company breaks off from Google.
Niantic Labs is the group within Google that’s behind the famed Ingress augmented reality game, but they have another app that definitely gets a lot less attention. It’s called Field Trip, and it lets you quickly and easily find places of interest around your physical location. You don’t even have to use the app yourself—it runs in the background and automatically lets you know when you’re getting close to “cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you.” Now, the app will send those notifications to your wrist…
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Google has worked with a gender equality campaign group to raise the profile of achievements by women in both its Field Trip app and future Google Doodles, reports TNW.
The campaign group SPARK (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance and Knowledge) pointed out to Google that its doodles featured women only 17% of the time, prompting the company to promise to do better in future and to add notable women from history to its Field Trip app.
Field Trip was first launched by Google back in 2012, as a background app that alerts you to interesting things around you as you travel. The original vintage UI was replaced by a Material Design refresh earlier this year. The app is also available on Google Glass.
If you want to take advantage of the new alerts, you need to check the Spark: Women on the Map option in the app. Field Trip so far features only 100 women, but anyone can nominate someone they feel should be included, suggesting that it may quickly grow.
You might not have heard of it, but Google has a first-party app on the Play Store called Field Trip that basically serves as a guide to all things located in your vicinity. The Mountain View company just recently released a new version of the app, bringing to it Material Design and a flurry of other improvements.
While the app used to sport a vintage look and feel that made it somewhat unique, the new version goes the opposite direction and simplifies the entire experience. In addition to the redesign, Google says that the new version comes with new content from “hundreds” of publishers and performance improvements.
Here’s the full change log:
V2.0.5
* New sleek & modern design.
* Easier to discover and browse more cool stuff around you.
* New content from hundreds of publishers.
* Performance improvements.
You can get Field Trip on the Play Store for free.
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Google has raised the profile of the Field Trip app, which provides a virtual tour guide to help you explore an area, by enabling users to launch it by voice with an “Ok Glass, explore nearby” command. Previously, you had to launch it via the touchpad. Existing users will need to toggle the app to launch it by voice.
Engadget reports that the app has also been updated with content from more publishers.
A little over 200, in fact. Some of the more recent additions include Happy Vermont and Guide to Copenhagen. Yennie Solheim Fuller, a Niantic Labs marketing associate, tells us that they’re constantly scouring the web for hyperlocal content that they can incorporate into the app, with sources that range from Zagat all the way to smaller blogs and community sites. “We want content on tiny towns like Belmont too,” she said, emphasizing that Field Trip won’t just have info about big cities.
While the app first appeared on Android and iOS, developer Niantic Labs said at the time it was launched on Glass that it was “conceived with Glass in mind, but Glass wasn’t ready.”
Google today announced that its launching a new education initiative that will see students taking “virtual field trips” using Google+ video chat Hangouts. Google explains that it’s now allowing teachers to sign up for the field trips through a program called Connected Classrooms.
Teachers are already using Google+ to make learning more relevant, collaborative and accessible—from exploring a world-class art museum to staging a play to venturing into space. Connected Classrooms aims to make it easier for teachers to access exciting educational content to share with their students. In addition to the virtual field trips, teachers who visit the Connected Classrooms site will have the opportunity to join a Google+ Community with other educators to collaborate on field trips and share best practices for using digital tools in the classroom.
The first locations featured as virtual field trips will include the Seattle Aquarium, the Minnesota Zoo and the Solar Impulse hangar. Google is also partnering with over 20 organizations to that will help organize the field trips, some of which include National Geographic, Matilda the Musical, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
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Google is today rolling out its Field Trip app, previously available only on Android and iOS, to those lucky enough to be part of its Google Glass explorers program. While the Google Glassware version of the app appears to offer a slightly stripped down version of the virtual tour guide experience, the hands-free experience with Glass seems to be a natural fit for Field Trip. John Hanke, who is in charge of the Niantic Labs project at Google told Cnet that Field Trip was actually “conceived with Glass in mind, but Glass wasn’t ready.”
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