Niantic Project: An example of transmedia story telling

The Niantic Project started in november 2012. The "investigation" started as an empty message board on www.nianticproject.com and was filled daily with additional clues and snippets of information. As details emerged it became clear that the story was being told by Google, as all of the clues lead to Google web pages.

The story involved a comic book artist called Tycho, a character who had become infamous for his appearances at the 2012 Comicon, handing out posters like this one:

http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/pac/IB/00/item/1ty1.jpg

At the same time there were posts about a guy who bought a phone on eBay to find that did very weird things in public places. These videos were posted on youtube and held clues to further websites with addresses similar to to that of the tycho poster above.

A wikia page was made to create a community working to solve these puzzles:

http://niantic-project.wikia.com/wiki/Day_12_-_11/12/12

Puzzles included sound files, youtube videos, hidden coded in documents, images which needed to be photoshopped to reveal more information, QR codes, Facebook and Google+ profiles, as well as physical clues at locations.

One of the puzzles that stumped the hole communities was "3vh1v". goo.gl/3vh1v, a shortened URL seemed to be a solution the puzzle but turned out to be a red hearing. The puzzle was eventually solved 555h5, using the "v" as the roman numeral for 5.

By the end of november it became known that the Niantic Project was publicity for a Google Product, a game called Ingress, a geotagging and social activities game which involved seeking out physical "ingress points" and geotagging yourself there both in the game and on G+ or Facebook.

I was quite involved in the puzzles, even being the first to solve the "antonin" puzzle. However the game is Android and U.S. only, which pissed a lot of the community who had worked on puzzles off