This is not a small problem.

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I'm sitting with Google's former maps chief John Hanke in the company's San Francisco offices looking out at the Bay's islands and bridges, which feel close enough to touch. We're talking about Field Trip, the new Android app his 'internal startup' built, when he says something that I realize will be a major theme of my life for the next five or 10 years. Yours too, probably.

But first, let me explain what Field Trip is. Field Trip is a geo-publishing tool that gently pushes information to you that its algorithms think you might be interested in. In the ideal use case, it works like this: I go down to the Apple Store on Fourth Street in Berkeley and as I get back to my car, I hear a ding. Looking at my phone, I see an entry from Atlas Obscura, which informs me that the East Bay Vivarium -- a reptilian wonderland that's part store, part zoo -- is a couple of blocks away. That sounds neat, so I walk over and stare at pythons and horned dragons for the next hour. Voila. "Seamless discovery," as Hanke calls it.

Dozens of publishers are tagging their posts with geocodes that Field Trip can hoover up and send to users now. Hanke's team works on finding the right moment to insert that digital information into your physical situation.

And when it works well, damn does it work well.

It's only a slight exaggeration to say that Field Trip is invigorating. That is to say: It makes life more interesting. And since I switched back to my iPhone after a one-week Android/Field Trip test, it's the one thing that I really miss.

At first, I was tempted to write off this effort as a gimmick, to say that Field Trip was a deconstructed guide book. But the app is Google's probe into the soft side of augmented reality. What the team behind it creates and discovers may become the basis of your daily reality in five or 10 years. And that brings me back to Hanke's comment, the one you could devote a career to.

"You've got things like Google Glass coming. And one of the things with Field Trip was, if you had [Google Glass], what would it be good for?" Hanke said. "Part of the inspiration behind Field Trip was that we'd like to have that Terminator or Iron Man-style annotation in front of you, but what would you annotate?"

There's so much lurking in that word, "annotate." In essence, Hanke is saying: What parts of the digital world do you want to see appear in the physical world?

If a Field Trip notification popped up about John Hanke, it might tell you to look for the East Bay hipster with floppy hair almost falling over his eyes. He looks like a start-up guy, and admits to being one despite his eight years at Google. He refers to its cofounders like old college friends. ("Sergey was always big on, 'You should be able to blow stuff up' [in Google Earth].") Not a kid anymore, Hanke sold an early massively multiplayer online gaming company to the legendary Trip Hawkins in the '90s, then co-founded Keyhole, which became the seed from which Google's multi-thousand person map division grew.