Released in September last year as a US only release, the Field Trip app from Niantic Labs – the team behind Ingress – is a location based app which provides notifcations when you are near certain points of interest from categories such as Architecture, Historic Places & Events, Lifestyle, Offers & Deals, Food Drinks & Fun, Movie Locations, Outdoor Art and Obscure Places.
Data from repositories such as Thrillist, Food Network, Zagat, Eater, Sunset, Cool Hunting, WeHeart, Inhabitat, Remodelista, Atlas Obscura, Daily Secret, Songkick and Flavorpill will point you towards local points of interest such as eateries, local music and unique stores. There are a huge amount of these to choose from, however the majority do appear to be US-Centric so check out each one. But it’s all relative and notifications will only come if you select those that you’re interested in.
The local outlook for Field Trip shows some badly placed objects, however there is a mechanism within Field Trip to select that allows you to change this, offering options to change location, report unintersting entries and more.
POIs that are currently included seem to be informative and quite interesting. The improvements seen since the initial launch of Field Trip are vast with a large number of local POIs such as Parliament House in Canberra now included.
Now, being a product from Niantic Labs, Field Trip can also use it to notify you when an Ingress portal is nearby. Under the Games tab you can choose your faction – Resistance or Enlightened – and Field Trip will then happily inform you when a portal is near.
Overall Field Trip appears to be a great tool to use when exploring a place you’re familiar with to gain new insights or when visiting a new place altogether. It’s available in Google Play now to download, give it a go it’s a free download for devices running Android 2.3 and above. Even though ita mere 3.2MB to download you will need a data connection to fully utilise the app and as it’s location based it appears to want GPS on continually so battery usage could be a problem.
