Field Trip

» see fieldtripper.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

An app that tells you what happened where you are standing is only as good as whoever wrote it down. Field Trip's cards came from Atlas Obscura and Zagat and a stack of American city blogs, so the further you walked from a well-documented western city the less it had to say. That is the whole reason it stays at a distance from me. It was available in Turkey after 2013 and there was very little in it for Turkey, because nobody had entered Turkey into the databases it was reading.

Field Trip was the first thing Niantic Labs ever shipped. John Hanke had sold Keyhole to Google in 2004, watched it become Google Earth, and then set up Niantic inside Google as something close to a startup with a corporate parent. The pitch was simple enough to state in one line: get people to explore the beautiful stuff around them. The app ran in the background, worked out where you were from GPS and cell signal, and popped a card when you came near something it knew about.

The cards were the product. A building with a story, or an odd piece of local history, delivered without you asking for it. By an interview in august 2013 Hanke put the number of source databases at a hundred and thirty. The partner list was the interesting part. Atlas Obscura supplied the strange and Dezeen supplied the architecture, with Google's own Zagat data sitting underneath everything. It launched on Android in the United States on 27 september 2012, reached the United Kingdom that december, got an iOS version in march 2013, and by may 2013 was in eighty countries and thirty languages.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was really for ~

Field Trip was built with Google Glass in mind before Glass shipped. A simplified Glass version arrived in august 2013, and Android Wear builds followed in 2015. That was the real design target: an assistant that speaks up when you are near something, on hardware you wear rather than hold. The phone app was the version that could actually reach people.

In august 2014 Google folded Field Trip's functionality into Google Now, and the standalone app kept running alongside it. This was the period when Google believed the future of search was unprompted, that the right result was one you never typed a query for. Google Now died of the same conviction a few years later. Field Trip outlived it by being small enough that nobody had to make a decision about it.

~ what it became ~

The part that actually mattered was the database. Every point of interest Field Trip collected and every location its users cared about became raw material for what Niantic built next. Ingress launched in november 2012, weeks after Field Trip, and used real-world landmarks as portals. Pokemon GO in 2016 used the same accumulated map of places worth walking to. When people ask why Pokemon GO's stops are so often a mural, a plaque or a strange fountain, part of the answer is that a tour-guide app spent years finding them first.

So Niantic's first product was a failure as a product and the foundation of everything that followed. Field Trip's mission statement, get outside and look at things, is the Pokemon GO mission statement with the game removed. The game turned out to be the necessary part.

~ the funny part ~

The shutdown notice went up on 12 july 2019 and it is short. Field Trip was pulled from the App Store and Google Play that day, and the post says services would end "later this year" so that Niantic could focus on augmented reality experiences serving millions of players. It acknowledges that some people were still using it and would be disappointed. It floats the possibility of a reimagined version at some point.

No date was ever announced for the actual switch-off, and no follow-up post exists. So an app whose entire purpose was telling you exactly when and where something happened does not have a recorded date of death. It has a month of announcement and a shrug. The reimagined version never came.

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