Niantic has dropped a teaser for a new item which appears to be called the kinetic capsule. Details are sparse at this writing, but agents have gleaned some tidbits from a Japanese live stream with Niantic employee Fumi. According to this source, the capsule allows agents to craft very rare items by selecting one of four recipes, inserting the items called for by the recipe into the kinetic capsule, then walking for a certain distance. The source also indicates that agents will have to be at least level 6 to craft items.
If this intel is accurate, it seems that this feature would work similarly to the incubators in Pokémon GO. If so, one could speculate that agents may receive a free, reusable kinetic capsule, and be able to buy additional, single-use kinetic capsules in the store. It would also indicate that something similar to the Pokémon GO Adventure Sync feature (which allows you to make progress toward hatching eggs without the game being open) could also find its way to Ingress. When Niantic releases official details about this feature, our Ingress Guide will be updated to include them.