Google’s Vice President of Niantic Labs John Hanke announced today that Google plans to make its trove of real-world map data available to game developers within the next year.
The announcement was part of Hanke’s DICE Summit talk about Google’s augmented reality mobile game Ingress. During the talk Hanke confirmed that Google will be working with a select group of developers in 2014 to build games usinggeographic data culled from Ingress, with a full API expected to release to the public in 2015.
This confirms some of what Niantic Labs product manager Brandon Badger told us last October about Google’s plans for Ingress, which included crafting an API that allows developers to build games that could change based on where the player is located, allow players to send messages or otherwise communicate using real-world geography, and more.
Source: Gamasutra