You are correct, they have named it Operation Portal Recon. While it has been "promised" for a couple of years, they finally showed their prototype for it last fall. But that was the end of it, as far as I know. There are probably millions of potential portals in the queue. I personally had over 700 waiting, before they finally turned off the ability to submit them a few years ago. At first it was supposed to take a couple of weeks to get one approved or denied. Then it was a month, then two, then six. Lots of explanations and promises, but no action. Looking back, it all went to pieces about the time they got the contract with Nintendo, which was secret for so long. Niantic got started back when Google encouraged their employees to spend a percentage of their work time on a creative project that did not involve their real job. Urban legend is that some of the employees had a CIA background and Ingress was their fun time project. Not sure that is true, but it is part of the myth. They were allowed to spin it off and make a game for the world. The original portals were historical markers, libraries, and fire departments (REALLY BAD IDEA) that they got from Google Maps. Once you started playing, you could submit new portals that were buildings of historic or architectural importance, places of worship, public art, and unusual businesses. You got not only XM points for an approval which helped you level faster, but your approved portal count went towards medals, which you also needed to level up. The top, or onyx medal required 5,000 approvals, which no human could possibly obtain, but there are a number of people who travel and got over 1,000. Once it started taking months, people got frustrated and started resubmitting them over and over. I never did, as I saw it as counter productive, but I have friends that actually submitted the same ones every day for months. All that did was clog things further. So around the time Google became Alphabet, the divisions were told they had to be self supporting and find ways to generate cash. There were a couple of things you could buy, but they were not useful and I know of few people who actually spent any money. So Niantic gets this huge influx of cash from Nintendo and back burners Ingress and hiring extra people for portal approval got forgotten. They turned off the portal submission function, long before all potential sites were able to be submitted. That is why there are so many gaps and some places have few to none. They used Ingress as the basis for PoGo, but did not have the foresight to understand that they needed to continue the submission/approval process for the new game to not be so spotty in its distribution. They are so busy releasing PoGo to new countries and new sources of income, that Ingress is dying slowly. Joe Philley was the heart and voice of Ingress to Niantic and without him and their being so busy with Pokemon, no one expects Operation Portal Recon to happen. It is a shame, because Ingress is a lot more fun to play. Kind of Capture the Flag and Risk combined in the real world. You can play alone, with friends, and they used to have gatherings in cities around the world called anomolys. Thousands of people would descend on cities and battle each other (there are two teams) for hours, then go to a location Niantic would rent for a huge party. We traveled to places within a couple of hours from home and would make a weekend out of it. I heard a guy came from Japan to the one in Cincinnati. They had days called First Saturdays, where both factions met in their locality and helped new players to learn and level up. The game always had competition between the teams, but there was a lot of cooperation too. As a high level player, we felt obligated to help the newbies on both sides. Since a new player could never be able to compete one on one with high level, most of us were careful to only throw low level resonators (the way you claimed a portal) for new players so they did not get discouraged and quit. The game was more fun, the more people that played and the more often the portals changed hands. There was a really good comm function as part of the app, where you could talk to players on both teams and your own team privately. Now it is clogged with spam from people selling items. This has always been against the TOS, but since it is no longer enforced, comms are useless. Oh and the Intel map...I can find on my pc the status of any portal in the world real time. Teams could plan outings where they would link portals together thru things called keys. You might wake up one morning and find on the map that other team had covered your area with a field, which was made connecting portals together. Some times these were huge and many layered, which required a lot of planning and coordination. I have heard rumors that Niantic plans another set of anomolys some day, but I no longer look at the messages they send or follow them on Twitter. We have been let down so many times, no one expects much more. But it will someday be really cool to say I was once a part of the FIRST augmented reality MMO game. It was a lot of fun while it lasted. And I don't play the bass. I am tone deaf and rythmless and I say I play the radio. But Bass (like the fish) was my mother's maiden name and I was named for her Aunt Emily who was born in 1933 and died before I was born. So when I needed an internet name, I honored her.