Above: Spellista dog
de Masi: So if Glass takes off, we hopefully have something between a Draw Something and an Instagram type of phenomenon. We’ve obviously done most of our damage in the core business on tablets and phones. This is a great opportunity for us to broaden our appeal and do something for a very broad demographic, very casual. We’re doing it in conjunction with brand new hardware, so we have an advantage getting into this new area of the market.
Above: A model demonstrates Google’s new Project Glass technology.
GB: What would you compare this to as far as other past experiments you’ve done? You mentioned Android. Does this kind of thing happen for you very often?
de Masi: Glu’s going on 12 years. We have been early to every piece of mobile hardware, in the broadest sense of the word, that we think has an odds-on probability of being a goer. We were early to Palm, to RIM. We were also early to things like controllers. Sourabh has a lot of practice in this industry as far as making that work early for the Android system.
Looking back at what’s worked and what hasn’t worked, it’s obviously done good things for us to be early on Android. It was great to be early on iOS. We built some of the first games for the first iPhone in 2007. Every five or 10 years, something more revolutionary than evolutionary comes along. It’s been six or seven years since the first iPhone. This could be one of those moments. The next seven years could well be a wearable wave. It could happen as fast or even faster than the smartphone, this PC in your pocket.
It’s a great way for us to be early to something that could take off exponentially. It also gives us a technological lead in potentially building a publishing platform around Glass, if that goes anywhere. We’ve built a lot of proprietary tools, and we have some proprietary intellectual property now. All of that we can leverage in the long term.
I’m cautiously optimistic that this is an iPhone moment, so to speak. If you think about how quickly hardware and software progress these days, this thing—I’m sure you’ve heard that the prototypes now are not even two years old. They were the size of a laptop. Look at it now. Imagine where it’ll be in two more years or four more years. There’s a miniaturization opportunity where that could get small enough so that I could go to Lenscrafters and install it as an option on my glasses. That day will come. The question is when.
There’s more and more clever heuristic technology in these devices. The voice recognition is impressive compared to most other platforms. The gyroscope, the accelerometer, all this stuff is getting cleverer and cleverer. It doesn’t have a cell phone connection in there at the moment, but I would imagine that in the fullness of time, those kinds of things are going to come into play.
Above: Ingress Kiev event
GB: Which things are you taking advantage of from Glass in this game?
Ahuja: We have the voice tutorials, so we use the microphone. We’re using voice recognition. We’re using the gyroscope. We’re also using the Mirror API that was released some time ago. That was the only way to make games for Glass until yesterday. That’s how our website connection works with the app. We’re using the camera for user-generated content.
To be honest, when we were sitting in the Q&A for the GDK yesterday, every developer was asking questions that we’d already tackled in the last two or three months and are using in the game, with the combination of the GDK and the Mirror API. We’ve done Glass to Glass, which even the Glass guys don’t offer right now. We’ve figured out how to do that with our website.
We have a head start. The Google guys are actually amazed at the speed with which we were able to do things. That’s the expertise of our Android team.
GB: Are you anticipating a certain number of Glass games at a certain point, bringing some brands over onto it?
de Masi: We haven’t said anything about that so far. We’re trying to build new IP here. When you say “brands,” other Glu brands, perhaps, but this is such a unique piece of hardware. Our view is that you have to create brand new concepts, and probably brand new brands and IP.
In the long term, who knows how interoperability will work? It’s easy to see how playing a Glu game on your tablet could sync with notifications to your phone and your Glass and so on. But you won’t be able to play exactly the same experience on all these devices.
Ahuja: Just today I was discussing how, if you take a racing game, we could use this as the speedometer. You can’t have Glass distract you too much. You can’t concentrate on that and play something with your phone at the same time. But if it was just some big bold letters, one number, or doing navigation with turns, something that’s always showing up in a racing game, we could make these two talk with each other.
de Masi: There are two big opportunities. We have the Glass-only games, like Spellista, and then the “and” instead of the “or.” The watches and glasses at some point will be a big “and” for gaming on your mobile device. You can do amazing things with all three of them if you think about different control schemes. They all have gyroscopes in them.
Ahuja: With the games-as-service stuff we’re doing now, maybe you can’t really play the game because you’re in a meeting, but if you get a notification on your Glass, you can tell it to go feed your crops.
Above: Ingress on a phone
de Masi: Your base is being attacked!
Ahuja: Exactly. There could be binary actions you could do just by tapping through Glass.
de Masi: Or voice commands. Kill!
Ahuja: It sends the command to our server, and the next time you launch the game on your phone or tablet, that’s already taken care of for you.
GB: Someone like Gameloft, they go to a lot of new platforms as well. Do you feel like you distinguish from the way they operate?
de Masi: I’m fairly bold and confident that in terms of Android expertise, Glu is the world leader right now, at least in gaming. Not in the volume of headcount we have, but certainly by any efficiency metric, as well as our ability to get to new technology. We’ve crushed everybody for at least four years, if not six years, quite regularly. If you look at the things we’ve been first at, it’s probably a dozen in the last six years.
GB: How many people do you have right now?
de Masi: Worldwide, between 500 and 550.
GB: For this, how many resources are you putting into it right now?
Ahuja: Three, plus me as a supervisor. I wasn’t full time on the project. It’s been three or four months. We did a lot of original art for this game, too.