Mote & Beam

Alexis Madrigal on Google’s “Field Trip”

Madrigal builds a story about the challenges of the first generation of consumer augmented reality around “Field Trip,” a product of Google's “startup within a startup,” Niantic Labs.

“You've got things like Google Glass coming. And one of the things with Field Trip was, if you had [Google Glass], what would it be good for?” Hanke said. “Part of the inspiration behind Field Trip was that we'd like to have that Terminator or Iron Man-style annotation in front of you, but what would you annotate?”

There's so much lurking in that word, “annotate.” In essence, Hanke is saying: What parts of the digital world do you want to see appear in the physical world?