(Photo: Google Play store)

When Google launched its new worldwide alternative reality game earlier this month, the web lit up with widespread questions. The game, called Ingress, allows users to move through the physical world with their Android devices, collecting pockets of energy in various locations that they can then use to complete virtual quests. It was an interesting idea, but on the surface appeared to not make any significant contributions to the company's bottom line. Why would Google, which has $217.59 billion market cap, allocate time and resources to a free Android game?

Technology Review called it "augmented reality's first killer app." AllThingsD reported that because the game incorporates real stores and businesses into its plotline, it's a natural next-level venue for advertisers--Zipcar, Jamba Juice and Chrome apparel have already all signs on to host ads on Ingress.

PandoDaily, meanwhile, pointed out the potential privacy violations that could occur when a game constantly requires users to record their GPS location:

Google has created an elaborate ruse to convince (possibly hundreds of) millions of people to share far more location and behavior data with the company than has ever been the case before.

And if there’s one thing Google can’t get enough of it’s data. The company made its fortunes by collecting more data (and better structuring and analyzing it into advertising opportunities) than any company in the world. Search history. Email correspondence. Maps usage. Content purchase and consumption. Google’s been watching. And it’s made billions off what it’s learned.

But there's another thing Ingress could do: Google could have its users help collect mapping data. (The company hasn't confirmed or denied this.) When playing Ingress, users are asked to explore walking trails, bike paths and other areas that haven't necessarily been documented by Google's StreetView cars. The geo data, photos and video recorded by game players is crucial in order for Google to successfully flesh out its walking maps. Knowing that even a company of its scale doesn't have the resources to map all walking paths across the world, Google has essentially convinced users to help them do their jobs by gamifying data collection.

If this tactic doesn't sound familiar, it should. Back in 2007, Google launched the GOOG-411 service, a free, voice-activated local search tool. Like Ingress, it seemed like a strange move at first: why would Google foot the bill for a Yellowpages-type service? But a few months after GOOG-411′s launch, then-VP of search products Marissa Mayer explained just why Google had decided to launch the service. GOOG-411 was collecting spoken syllables in order to build out its speech recognition tool, now employed widely across Android devices. But a few months after GOOG-411′s launch, Marissa Mayer, then-VP of search products, explained that GOOG-411 was collecting spoken syllables in order to build out its speech recognition tool, now employed widely across Android devices.

As Ms. Mayer told Infoworld in an interview in 2007:

You may have heard about our [directory assistance] 1-800-GOOG-411 service. Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model ... that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.

The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.

Ingress appears to be yet another version of this masked data collection strategy. By asking users to create new Portals, for example, Google could tap into a database of geo-tagged photos without ever having to head to the remote location themselves. After all, mapping the wilderness takes a fair amount of legwork. "You’ve seen our cars, trikes, snowmobiles and trolleys—but wheels only get you so far,” the company wrote back in June about its wilderness trekking camera. “There’s a whole wilderness out there that is only accessible by foot.”

Ingress creator John Hanke did not respond to a request for comment.

The glasses. (Google+)

It's well-known that all Googlers are brainiacs, but the Google X team represents the cream of the crop: some of the most elite programmers and thinkers in the company are handpicked for Google X, which is tasked with some of the most innovative projects Google outputs. The most recent manifestation of Google X's collective brilliance? Project Glass, Google's attempt at augmented reality glasses.

Last month, we reported that the Terminator-style glasses would soon bring the future to your face, but today, Google officially announced the project on Google+, complete with a video demonstrating how the high tech specs work.

In the video, a dude goes about a typical day--making coffee, eating a sandwich, catching the subway--all with the help of his Google glasses. When he looks outside, the glasses display the weather. When he looks at the subway, they tell him that 6 train service is suspended. When someone pings him, he responds to their message simply by speaking. (Hip New York spots like Strand and the MUD truck also get a shout out.)

The glasses are so intensely futuristic that we have a hard time wrapping our heads around them. They remind us of Sixth Sense, an augmented reality program demo'd at TED in 2009. That project was far from being ready to market to the consumer, but Google seems a bit closer to making augmented reality an actual reality.

"A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment," reads the Google+ post. "We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do."

Technology is moving so damn fast these days! Next we'll all be destroying the New York Times with our faces. As esteemed Betabeat reporter Nitasha Tiku lamented, "I seriously want to smash my iPad every time I hear about these glasses."

Silicon Valley startup Nicira, which raised $50 million last year, opened to the public today and announces impressive customer list including AT&T, Fidelity and eBay [Business Insider]

Ten-thousand tweets per second in the final three minutes of the Super Bowl [TechCrunch]

Sony and Panasonic expect heavy losses [Business Week]

Surprise, surprise, Facebook still has deleted photos on its servers after three years [Ars Technica]

Wire frame of the towers from Mr. August's Greenpoint rooftop.

For many of us, the Manhattan skyline is marked as much by absence as presence. Hanging out on his rooftop on Hope Street in Greenpoint, Brian August was trying to explain to a friend the void left behind, both in the mind and to the eye, by the loss of the Twin Towers.

There was some copper tubing lying around from an art project and Mr. August mocked up a simple sculpture to show a friend how the towers had appeared from that rooftop nine summers earlier. The finished product, a stark outline of the towers scaled to fit the skyline, struck Mr. August with a deep emotion.

“This really started ten years ago,” said Mr. August, a lifelong New Yorker. “I started thinking to to myself, how many people go about their routines in New York, and they get to a certain place where they always used to stop and look at the towers. What if you could give everyone this experience, and a way to share it with others.”

The result is 110 Stories, a mobile app Mr. August created for iPhone, and soon Android. Its purpose is simple, said Mr. August: orient, augment, comment.

Users open the app, which orients them to point their camera at where the towers would have been. When they snap a photo, the app augments the picture by sketching in how the towers would have appeared. Finally, it prompts them to comment on what that the resulting image means to them.

“I kept telling the developers, simpler, simpler,” said Mr. August. Instead of a cheesy pair of computer-generated towers, the app generates a haunting wireframe silhouette like the one Mr. August first created on that Greenpoint rooftop.

Augemented reality apps have a bad reputation, deservedly so. Most have been used for corny marketing campaigns or pretentious art projects. Mr. August’s app, with its simple, specific purpose, manages to offer an alternate snapshot of reality that is jarring and profound.

“It occcured to me that there is a whole generation growing up, and people who have never visited New York, who will have no conception of how big the towers were, how beautiful and how iconic, and all the different vantage points around New York where you could see them.”

While Mr. August has been thinking about this project for ten years, it was only in the last two months that he decided to throw everything he had behind making it a reality.

“You know, you reach a point when you’re obsessed with something, where you feel like its possible, and for me that was maybe two months ago, where this idea was just kind of cascading through my brain, I just said to myself, if you don’t do this, with the ten year anniversary coming up, you will be kicking yourself for the rest of your life.”

Mr. August put 110 Stories on Kickstarter in order to raise funds, eventually surpassing his goal and raising more than $27,000, meaning the app will be live on the iPhone in time for the anniversary. The normally verbose Mr. August recently released a video thanking everyone and expressing his sentiments with just three words. “We did it.”