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The Google project to put an aquarium full of water bears inside a phone
- Animats 10y agoI saw that in a list of Ara modules. They had real trouble coming up with useful modules to justify the thing.
- joshmarinacci 10y agoI can think of plenty of use for modules. The problem is that none of them are general purpose. There are tons of niche applications though. They should have made an industrial phone for $1000. Lots of people would have bought them for interesting use cases that Google never would have thought of. The challenge is that a hackable industrial strength phone is not a ten billion dollar business, which is what Google wants.
- rickycook 10y agothere are so many things that google markets poorly, or to the wrong audience. glass would have been amazing for industrial or many professional jobs, wave was a collaboration tool released to individuals, and now this where people want "an input device" for a niche application and would currently pay tens of thousands of dollars for such a thing. it's really quite upsetting that all these fantastic technologies are wasted because of this push for "social" and mass market.
- MegaButts 10y agoLooking from the outside in, it seems the problem is with management. I have never worked at Google, but I know many people who have. None of them have said positive things about their managers. Obviously this is anecdotal, but I see little reason to believe otherwise.
- harrisonweber 10y agoOne big thing here is that Ara was part of ATAP which was acquired from Motorola (back when Google owned Motorola). So the culture of this project is an unusual one, even for Google. The heavy dependence on outside contractors probably made for a complicated setup, but I don't think that was the problem. From the outside, it feels like ATAP/Project Ara just ran the clock out. If they'd have gotten the phone done and ready to ship faster, maybe things would be different today.
- rrdharan 10y agoI work at Google, and have had several managers during my two stints at the company, all of whom I consider to be quite good.
- obmelvin 10y agoGlass is now being used for medical and industrial purposes
- mmanfrin 10y agoAnything niche but important enough to warrant a $1000 phone that could take another $xxx component is also something that could easily have a $xxx USB-C component.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago> a $xxx USB-C component Which you plug into your laptop. Which is a technological device that everyone has, and which is (to a degree) extensible. Or it's a PCIe card, and it slots into your PC. The idea behind Ara is that your phone could do what the laptop or PC can do. I'm running an LG G5 with the Cam+ adapter right now. It's a fantastic idea, but hamstrung by the fact that there are only a handful of modules and they're all proprietary.
- wtallis 10y agoPhones can use already USB peripherals. Just look at the FLIR One and Seek thermal cameras, which start at $200 compared to ~$600 for a mediocre phone with a thermal camera or ~$500 for a dedicated thermal camera device.
- ClassyJacket 10y agoNo, I think the person you replied to meant that you can make a USB-C accessory for the phone. USB-C ports are on phones, in fact the majority of new Android phones now have them.
- vidarh 10y agoYes, but that also has the advantage of not tieing you to the phone, and not tieing you to a specific phone. At the very least, if someone wants to make a componentised phone like this, they should make (at least a subset of) the interface electrically compatible to USB C, so you could have a cheap/simple mechnical adapter to use most modules with any USB C capable hardware to widen appeal. Some sort of standardized form factor for small embeddable hardware with dimensions that makes it feasible for one of the "carriers" could be a phone would be interesting. In fact, doing it by starting with creating some dev boards with various functionality + the adapter first, and only considering a phone if/when it gets traction could make it viable for someone to bootstrap or do on kickstarter. The problem was going straight for a phone which has pretty much no advantages applicable to a large enough group of users to be viable until/unless there's a large ecosystem of interesting modules first.
- Animats 10y agoMany of the things you might want to attach don't fit into the flush form factor. A credit card reader. An ultrasonic scanner for imaging. Various medical sensors. A phone where you could clamp sizable accessories onto one end might be more useful.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoIndeed. Even having to figure out a way to hold my phone while it's external battery pack is plugged in is a pain. I used to just swap batteries, back when that was possible. My phone is capable of having a lot of things plugged into it, but it stops working well as a handheld device at that point.
- usrusr 10y agoAll the modularity one would ever need is a robust mechanical interface for the back side cover and a ribbon connector standard for internal USB (a convention might even be enough, e.g. "microSD with wires"), or at least power. The mechanical challenge of integrating your combined pong controller wheel/tire pressure gauge (or whatever your personal long tail use case might be) into a custom made back cover would be the excuse for existence all those dust-gathering 3D-printers have been waiting for.
- cobookman 10y agoYep would have been amazing in the industrial industry. However industrial industry is all about low volume high unit cost. As for an example industrial phone here's an RFID reader Android phone for 2.5k. https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/trimble-juno-t41-rugged-rfid-reader-uhf-bluetooth-wi-fi-wwan-android-gps-camera/ https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/trimble-juno-t41-rugged-rfid-...
- mirimir 10y agoHow about starting with discrete radio and modem? Maybe a real LAN? Gaming GPU?
- nradov 10y agoWhat we need is for Android device manufacturers to agree on a standard mounting point to attach a single external module. Something like a rail or magnet on the back at a fixed position relative to the USB port so that we can securely attach a peripheral without having it fall off.
- Animats 10y agoPut a Picatinny rail on the top end of the phone. That's a standard way to attach stuff to guns, and there are lots of things which attach to it. Car mounting becomes easy.
- nradov 10y agoNot sure if you're serious but a Picatinny rail would be way over engineering for small phone peripherals. Consumers wouldn't accept something so bulky and sharp. And the mounting point should be at the bottom of the phone next to the USB port to allow for a secure electrical connection.
- webwielder2 10y agoIs this the innovation that's supposedly lacking at Apple under Tim Cook?
- bitmapbrother 10y agoYou mean innovation like the Touch Bar?
- petee 10y agoAnd "Dongle-Christmas"? :P
- gravypod 10y agoThese sealed aquatic systems are really cool. How do you go about finding out how much of everything you need to put in them for long term survival? Can the biological processes of these simple organisms be modeled as checmical equations and all you need to do is balance them out and solve for the mols of everything you need to pour in?
- ehsanu1 10y agoGuessing it's a bunch of trial and error right now - these systems are pretty hard to predict in general and I'm not aware of a whole lot of research into closed ecological systems. Which is a shame really. A self-sustaining system like we'd want should come to its own dynamic equilibrium, given a decent enough starting state, which does make the trial and error slightly more feasible, and of course they have to have some idea of the inputs and outputs of the various organisms.
- aaronjg 10y agoThere is some research on these ecosystems [1], and there dynamics [2,3]. The ecosystem is made up of a photosynthetic algae as a producer, a protozoa as a consumer, and a bacteria as a decomposer, and can be stable for over 1,000 days. [1] http://ir.obihiro.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10322/221/1/Prot.Vol.5-1-3.pdf http://ir.obihiro.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10322/221/1/Prot.Vo... [2] http://www.cell.com/cell/pdfExtended/S0092-8674(12)00515-6 http://www.cell.com/cell/pdfExtended/S0092-8674(12)00515-6 [3] http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.5.041014 http://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.5.0410...
- pvaldes 10y agoStable for 1000 days is not the same thing as 'will remain clean for 1000 days'. Have this phones a undisclosed problem with overheating that would suggest to add water as heat buffer?
- gravypod 10y ago> I'm not aware of a whole lot of research into closed ecological systems I'm sure NASA and SpaceX have to be doing something like this.
- xyzzy4 10y agoSounds like they are doing great things with investors' money.
- Reason077 10y agoYeah, but not just investors money. One of the sad things about Google is that it seems to soak up so many bright, highly paid minds - then puts them to work on relatively useless things. It's inefficient allocation of humanity's intellectual resources.
- josephg 10y agoI daydream sometimes that lightning strikes and both google and facebook suddenly go out of business. So many of the world's best and brightest software engineers work at those companies. Suddenly out of work they'd be motivated to start those little business they've always wanted to have. I think we'd see an explosion of cool new ideas & businesses pop up in the tech community.
- jboggan 10y agoA bit like the ending of "God Emperor of Dune". I have nothing but great things to say about the quality of the engineers at Google . . . but I do think our purposes are suboptimal.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoI can't wait for the day I get to search by IP address.
- HeyLaughingBoy 10y agoNot just Google. Trust me, it happens at lots of large companies that have plenty of money to waste.
- harrisonweber 10y agoCourter point: The team here developed some interesting new mobile microscopy techniques. It's possible, had the project completed development, that some other cool things could have come from a "useless" tech-art project.
- 1001101 10y agoWould make an interesting random number generator (which are tough to find on some systems). Waterbears are rad hard as well :) Would be tough for Mallory to "reduce their entropy."
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoActually true random number generators are cheap and to integrate into Silicon. The question is do you trust them? :-)
- rlpb 10y ago> Would be tough for Mallory to "reduce their entropy." According to the article, Mallory could just burn 100% CPU for a while to "reduce their entropy" forever.
- maxander 10y ago"Hey, the Ara is going nowhere, but it would be a shame to not get any return from it... Lets see how many click bait blog articles we can generate from it!"
- harrisonweber 10y agoAra's been gone since August. I sourced the story myself, not sure how it's click bait tbh! Did you read it?
- maxander 10y agoTo be clear, that line was something I imagined someone at Google saying prior to the developments mentioned in the article. But, "put an aquarium full of water bears in your phone"? That's a nonsense, fluff headline if I ever heard one. That they went so far as to actually do it, I will admit, redeems it somewhat! But not so much that I'll believe that the project had any goal beyond generating press. :D
- andrepd 10y agoOne: Ara is dead. Two: how is the article clickbait?
- sandworm101 10y agoCruelty to animals. I eat meat but do not like seeing anything suffer for purposes of amusement. These are small, but mistreating even insects can be a crime in the US (specifically if you film it). Give them a digital version and leave the actual animals out of such displays.
- harrisonweber 10y agoThe creators of this project told me they actually wondered if PETA would take offense. Ideally, though, the tardigrades would have had plenty of algae and room to swim around/reproduce.
- ntelson1s 10y agolol
- hyperdunc 10y agoJust in case you're not joking I'll point out that water bears do not suffer in any meaningful sense because they have far fewer neurons than even a mosquito.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago> I eat meat but do not like seeing anything suffer for purposes of amusement. Far worse things happen to the animals you eat than ever happened to these critters in their aquarium. I'm a meat-eater too, but I try to be honest with myself about it.
- cm2012 10y agoThere's a banned user that posted the right answer to this comment - lol. Where to even begin?
- rdtsc 10y agoThis is like the rumor of 1970's platform shoes filled with water and fish floating inside. But to be serious here are some of the other modules they planned on: http://www.modularphonesforum.com/news/yezz-another-28-module-concepts-project-ara-1887/ http://www.modularphonesforum.com/news/yezz-another-28-modul... And yeah some look pretty cool, a scale, iris detector, a better microphone and speaker, laser range finder, smoke detector (but could imagine perhaps other hazardous materials). Might think of other specialty application, but the problem is in any of those fields, there are probably higher quality tools already available not tied to an experimental expensive phone. They'd have to first make the phone as ubiquitous as an iPhone then start selling add-ons. Not make add-ons as as a major feature of the phone. But tardigrades just seems like a way to get someone in management to notice and say "Wait wut, we are spending the money on this? Somebody, please defund this project".
- kartickv 10y agoSad to see Ara die. I don't understand why they took three years to realise the path they were pursuing didn't work. Why couldn't they figure out earlier so they still had time to do something that works? Google should have pursued a less ambitious and more practical version of the idea. Instead of making everything replaceable, maybe just identify one component that would be. Like the camera. Why do I have to buy a new phone if all I want is a new camera? Would a phone with only one or two replaceable components be feasible to build, and not impose too many tradeoffs? The Ara team pursued the "everything should be replaceable" dream for too long, and failed. I wonder if a limited version would have been feasible. It doesn't make sense that you should buy a new smartphone, priced at as much as ₹80K ($1000) even if all you want is one new component. Imagine if you had to buy a new laptop for more storage for your movies, and external hard discs didn't exist. Or a bigger screen, when you could use an external monitor. And so on.
- rincebrain 10y agoThe problem with that is that it's not just one or two components that are new iterations when you upgrade your phone - CPU, GPU, display (or, more likely, generation of protective tech on display, at this point), camera, maybe speakers, the antenna(e) could be workable barring something like a 4G->5G iteration if they covered enough to start with...and that's all ignoring the custom-shaped battery, which would get smaller to fit the modular slot. Plus the one upgradable component that stops having feature-parity often long before the rest - software stack. The number of problems with getting random bugs out would get worse by the number of modular parts, and few Android vendors that I've seen keep phones updated for even 3 years, let alone 6. It's been the case for a long time that you lose customization when you shrink the form factor, as you start squeezing every component down to its minimal essentials, and because it lets you start making tradeoffs you can only make if you know intimate details of the entire platform. I would, quite fervently, like for a modular smartphone to work, and to not have to do the equivalent of paying hundreds of dollars every few years when my phone gives up the ghost or is EOL (or both). I just don't see the technology advancing that way until we get way better at miniaturization, such that fitting functionality into the phone form factor is no longer a strong pressure constraint.
- alexandersingh 10y agoComing across the Lapka concept for Project Ara[0] made me realize that the problem was to market this as a "phone" in the first place. Few people are willing to take the risk on a phone with an entirely new form factor, let alone an entirely novel premise, and no one would carry two phones around in their pocket. It seems like they missed an opportunity to position this as a customizable mobile computing platform. Or perhaps they did and thought it was too niche. [0] https://medium.com/@my_lapka/lapka-x-project-ara-78fc5fe9f50a https://medium.com/@my_lapka/lapka-x-project-ara-78fc5fe9f50...
- WheelsAtLarge 10y agoWe might have hit peak phone. As much as I try I don't get the reasoning on this one. How is it that these top techs could not find a better idea? Forget the aquarium, how about a really strong microscope. Or a portable testing lab or a television or some kind of art project.
- detaro 10y agoI'd say that aquarium counts as some kind of art project (art product?). Which seems like the thing you'd hire such an agency for, after you've run out of more sensible ideas.
- labster 10y agoThose poor tardigrades would be killed by all of the dangerous radiation coming from the phone. Just kidding, they'd be killed by the dangerous conduction from the phone. The little guys can't handle the rapid heat changes caused by the battery and CPU.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y agoReally? I seem to recall these organisms being almost indestructible. They can withstand temperature ranges from 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) (close to absolute zero) to about 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C) Battery and CPU heat output of a phone couldn't be more than 40 degrees C in variation, at a guess. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoNo one ever reads the article. > It turns out the myths about tardigrades — how they’re indestructible — are true, under the right circumstances. “They go into cryptobiosis. They shed up to 90 percent of their body water, turn into a little grain of rice, and that is the thing that survives in space, and that’s what survives in ice cores for 300 years, and you add water and they revive. Cryptobiosis requires very narrow environmental ranges in order to begin,” said Feehan. But a sudden change in temperature? Lab-bred tardigrades are no match for that.
- jwilk 10y agoFrom the HN guidelines: Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article.
- andybak 10y agoHow does that guideline apply if someone asks a question that is directly and clearly answered in the article? Is it OK to point out that the article covers that as long as one is polite about it? I'm not sure I understand if the rule is "you're allowed to correct people using information from the article as long as you don't tell them it was in the article" which is obviously silly - or "just don't be a dick about it" which seems covered by the general rule of "don't be a dick".
- patsplat 10y agoThe main thrust of the comments so far are negative, but in my opinion this was a great idea. Phones are personal devices. Plenty of time is spent on smoothly machined surfaces, wood cases, etc. A little biosphere is a beautiful idea, and likely cost a fraction of the overall project.
- yeukhon 10y agoIt would be cool if in the future a device can scan (real life scene, blood, piece of chalk) anything and tell you the composition and everything you ask. Think Pokedex and those fictional gadgets in sci-fi movies.
- spyder 10y agoThere is a company who is trying to do that with a spectrometer but they product is controversial: https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/16/scio-the-pocket-sized-molecular-analyzer-is-making-everyone-angry/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/16/scio-the-pocket-sized-mole...
- frozenport 10y agoSeven engineers? Isn't that a million dollar a year project?
- nashadelic 10y agoThese are google engineers so wouldn't be surprised if the burdened annual cost per engineer is $300k so upwards of $2M+
- PepeGomez 10y agoThe line between microdosing and tripping balls is thinner than many people realize.
- karmakaze 10y ago> One pitch outlined a module that transmits touch, like a high-tech version of the heartbeat feature in the Apple Watch. Seems unfair to group this with the far fetched ideas. I for one think this is a killer feature in a world that could use more opportunities for meaningful connections.
- imtringued 10y agoAnother crazy idea. Why not integrate a soldering iron? Soldering irons that are powered via USB with 1500mA and 5V exist and are basically just a heating element plus a 555 timer chip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-8D5t6TJYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-8D5t6TJYU