19 ms·

Project Tango

815 points by psbp 13y ago

Nate630 13y ago
Google needs more data so that Google Maps can map the inside of your house. :-)
uptown 13y ago
That link seems dead to me. This article has more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272849 http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/google-launches-project-tango/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/google-launches-project-tan...
jcoleh 13y ago
Google's answer to iBeacons?
- Synaesthesia 13y ago
  Totally different. iBeacons are a low power Bluetooth transmitter that can notify phones of their presence. This is a prototype phone for mapping scenes in 3D
d0 13y ago
Is it just latent paranoia, or can I just see evil uses for this?
- carbocation 13y ago
  Every new technology, as well as every old technology, can be used for "good" or for "evil." More broadly, many activities to which "goodness" can be assigned will vary in "goodness" based on the context (in many ethical systems).
- gus_massa 13y ago
  Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1215/ http://xkcd.com/1215/
ok_craig 13y ago
This technology inside Google Glass would be pretty killer.
- psbp 13y ago
  The first thing I imagined is a wearable with a clicker for the blind. You say navigate me to ___, and the clicker gives you hot and cold signals (lots of feedback vs. less) as well as maybe a buzzing feedback if you're approaching a hazard.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    You could apply current directly to your head to provide necessary signals, similar to how tDCS works. No buzzing required.
- sailfast 13y ago
  As long as it's in the phone, couldn't you tether it to Google Glass to generate a real-time HUD based on where you were? (and perhaps also capture images to attach to the 3D model) That was the first thing I thought about - actual augmented reality down to the inch would be quite something.
  - Crito 13y ago
    With future versions of Google Glass perhaps. The current version does not have a display that can provide a HUD in the way that it seems you are thinking.
  - omn 13y ago
    You don't have to tie it to google glass. You can make the phone itself serve as 'window' onto the "down to the inch" augmented reality.
  - rmc 13y ago
    It relies on some hardware sensors which are in the phone.
Hermel 13y ago
I'm looking forward to the first first-person shooter built on Tango. E.g. a ghostbusters game in which you walk around in your own house, the ghosts only being visible through your Tango.
- Nate630 13y ago
  Good idea! :)
- bryogenic 13y ago
  How about tactical coordination and mapping for teams (i.e. paintball / special operations)? I'm picturing the HUD 'map' from every FPS game, except it is based on the current view and relative locations of the team's devices.
  - cwe 13y ago
    This will eventually (hopefully?) get integrated into Glass, and provide that kind of HUD some have been waiting for.
  - JshWright 13y ago
    How about a HUD that projects a map onto a firefighter's SCBA facepice? That would be absolutely incredible... Firefighters die every year because they get disoriented and lost in zero-visibility conditions. Even if it didn't have a pre-generated map of the structure loaded... it could build a map as it went, and at least be able to provide a 'retrace my steps' view.
    - Crito 13y ago
      I wonder at what point ITAR kicks in for that sort of firefighter equipment. I know traditional night-vision is covered, and I can certainly see "smoke-vision" having straightforward military applications.
      - JshWright 13y ago
        This is an issue with current firefighting technology. Thermal imaging cameras are quite common in the fire service. Most manufacturers limit the frame rate of the camera to 9fps or less, as this falls beneath the 'fast camera' spec for ITAR.
atburrow 13y ago
It would be very interesting to see an application for this using Glass. Could this potentially help blind people navigate in unknown environments?
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  Yeah it could be used for that, though I'm not sure why Google Glass would be used in that situation. A chest strap to mount the device looking forward and maybe headphones in the blind user's ears (to speak out TTS directions, or even just tones which represent directions) would be a better feedback mechanism.
  - atburrow 13y ago
    I agree. I suppose a Google Glass would be a bit silly since the screen would be unused, but seeing as it has most of the technology built in already, it would be easier to get a prototype working. An ear piece is another bonus added to the device as it could notify the user of obstacles.
roycehaynes 13y ago
Tango looks a lot like The Structure Sensor by Occipital - http://structure.io/ http://structure.io/
- rch 13y ago
  I still like that Occipital is planning to ship a standalone unit, and support people wanting to 3D print various housings. I guess the positive interpretation is that crowdfunding seems to be putting some pressure on larger companies to go public with research projects earlier than they normally would.
- rasz_pl 13y ago
  its not, structure.io is using Primesense sensor. Tango appears to be doing structure from motion
fidotron 13y ago
If you were to build an Android powered robot isn't this exactly what you'd need inside it?
Aoyagi 13y ago
Every time something new comes out from Google or Microsoft, I just wait to see where is the catch. There is always the catch.
- aquadrop 13y ago
  Now Google wants to index whole physical world, with help of millions of smartphones.
- nivla 13y ago
  I guess the catch in this would be that they get to integrate the public scans with Google Maps and/or help train Google Glass about the surroundings.
Nogwater 13y ago
Could this do real-time position, rotation, and gesture tracking if it was embedded in a VR head-mounted display?
gamegoblin 13y ago
I wonder if it uses the machine vision aspect to prevent the typical problem of accelerometer drift. e.g. by orienting itself relative to walls/other stationary things. Also, imagine making a 3D "scanner" that you can scan objects with into a virtual world, or print out on a 3D printer.
- gallamine 13y ago
  Accelerometers usually don't have significant drift - digital gyroscopes do. The acceleromters are quite noisy though (and measure both gravity and acceleration). From some of the brief images in the intro movie it looks like the cameras are doing tracking and alignment of "interesting" features. Things like that fall into the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology area. Very cool stuff.
  - boucherm 13y ago
    Well, maybe was I just unlucky, but I tried to use an IMU for my SLAM and was shocked by the extravagant amount of drift of accelerometers.
    - greendestiny 13y ago
      Do you mean the accelerometer values drifted over time (i.e. the direction of gravity shifted on a stable accelerometer) or do you mean the value when doubly integrated drifted?
      - boucherm 13y ago
        Right: the doubly integrated values shifted while the sensor didn't move.
        boucherm 13y ago
        *drifted
jlas 13y ago
"Unfortunately, due to FCC restrictions, we can only send development units to incorporated entities or institutions at this time." That's a bummer. Also, the page's default background-color should be set to black (or something dark). Most of the text is white(ish) and with a slow connection the background images take a while to load, making it impossible to read while you wait. /rant
- cakeface 13y ago
  This is a little creepy actually when you think about it. Here is this amazing new technology and the government says that only corporations are allowed to possess it. I'm sure that there are reasons but on the face of it I feel like it is right out of a cyberpunk book.
  - MattGrommes 13y ago
    It's probably because sending to a company can fit under testing purposes but going to a person needs to be more rigorously controlled for interference and the like. Still, an unfortunate and old fashioned restriction in today's culture.
  - stan_rogers 13y ago
    That just indicates that it hasn't passed Class B certification yet (under Title 47 CFR Part 15), which basically means that as an unintentional RF radiator (that is, at least in part not an intentional radiocommunication device), it hasn't yet been shown not to interfere with other devices. Even the wall wart for charging your phone needs to meet Class B in order to be sold or supplied for household use.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
  I suspect a single-person LLC would count, and in most states (other than CA) you can set that up for less than the cost of a phone. http://www.andysirkin.com/GetDocument.cfm?Resource=224&Hit=1 http://www.andysirkin.com/GetDocument.cfm?Resource=224&Hit=1 [this is not legal advice]
  - 13y ago
epmatsw 13y ago
Makes me think of the arm computers from the Neanderthal Parallax. I'd love to get my hands on one of these
pinaceae 13y ago
interesting that they built this into a phone. but i guess once you need a mobile computing device with a screen and a camera you end up with a "phone" nowadays. the reliance on lenses is a hinderance though as it has two and holding it without covering them both requires user effort. you can see it at the end of their video where a finger is partially over the second lens. still, exciting!
- salgernon 13y ago
  Surely the right place for this is in a google glass. Or at that point, given the sensors required, a google helmet.
_random_ 13y ago
"written in Java, C/C++, as well as the Unity Game Engine" - good news and a discreet way of saying they support C# via Mono!
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Except you can't really use Unity for standard line of business applications and their Mono runtime is stuck in .NET 3.5 land.
  - _random_ 13y ago
    I personally don't like Unity, but at least Google is starting to think out of the mainstream OSS box.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      I was looking forward to the FOSDEM talk about ART, but they cancelled it. The only thing we can infer from the public source code is that it has been enabled by default for whatever might be the next release. So no news if with ART, other languages could be better supported or not.
kodablah 13y ago
Here's the best idea I can think of with this technology. Imagine taking a scan of your pantry, refrigerator, and/or laundry room. Then mark everything as what it is (e.g. "box of cheez-its", "milk", etc). Then come back a few days and do the scan again and it'll tell you what's missing. Once you return from shopping, scan again saying what the new items are (even if they aren't what was there). The software would probably need to recognize certain shapes so a slight rearrangement/movement doesn't change. It'd be like history/bookmarks/favorites for perishables!
- lttlrck 13y ago
  If it's already missing it needed replacing yesterday.
- nivla 13y ago
  Isn't it much easier to just look into your refrigerator/pantry and keep a mental track of things? There are a few pitfalls to your suggested method: * It takes a good amount of time scanning and cataloging everything and we are taking about a world where people don't find enough time to scribble down these things on a piece of paper. * What if you pulled out cereal box A and cereal box B but switched places when putting them back? * Since its scanning the boundary of objects, it won't be able to tell you if your Milk is empty, half empty or full. The one thing I could think of where this is useful is in scanning rooms/objects which are for sale. Like 3d scanning the bike you are going to sell, or a realtor using it to provide a virtual 3d tour of a house. However, Microsoft already did it with their Photosynth program and regular photos you take [1], so I am not sure how this is going to fair if it turns out to be expensive. [1] http://photosynth.net/ http://photosynth.net/
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    I think the automated fridge/pantry will be sort of useless right up until the point where it becomes seamless. Then it will just be a nice convenience, not a big deal. But that describes huge swaths of technology, so go figure.
  - kodablah 13y ago
magicalist 13y ago
"- Johnny Lee and the ATAP-Project Tango Team" Johnny Lee was the guy with the awesome Wii Controller demos back in 2007 (can't believe it's been that long). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw edit: here's the full set of demos: http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ (also, I'm assuming it's the same guy, but his site says he's at Google now)
- yelnatz 13y ago
  I am so happy to see a familiar face when I played the video. Back in 07/08 when he demoed his hacks in TED it really blew my mind. [1] I was really hoping someone would pick him up and let him loose on some projects. I guess Google did just that. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H1zrLZwPjQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H1zrLZwPjQ
  - bradyd 13y ago
    He worked on the Kinect project at Microsoft as well. In fact he put up the prize money for the Open Kinect contest run by Adafruit to develop drivers for the Kinect. http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/windows-drivers-for-kinect.html http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/windows-drivers...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- balls187 13y ago
  Pretty awesome to see what he's been up too.
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  I was Google when they were trying to hire him, he turned them down to go work at Microsoft. Its interesting to see him at Google these days. I was really inspired by his projector/Wii hacks. I even built a couple with some of those pico projector units that Woot gets now and then for $100. My interest was building a simpler structured scanner for doing 3D printing.
skywhopper 13y ago
I wish I could go back to the time when I thought this kind of thing was awesome. Nowadays, it's just one more aspect of our private lives that'll be stored on Google's (or whomever) servers, sold to advertisers, harvested by the NSA, and abused by law enforcement. Add some object recognition to the 3D scanning, and you can start getting marketing messages about how much better [Featured Brand]'s refrigerator would suit your needs, courts will rule that no reasonable person would expect the interior contents of their house to be private and require a search warrant, and the DEA will be able to find something that looks enough like drug paraphenalia in the images from anyone's home to justify a home invasion of whoever their preferred target of the moment is.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - mempko 13y ago
    It isn't paranoia if they are actually watching you.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - yazaddaruvala 13y ago
        The problem is also that, "watching you" is a bad analogy. It implies, like you mention, that the entity has to prioritize who/what they "watch". This is a bad analogy because unlike humans, who can't watch historic events and therefore can only speculate at them (not held up in court), these entities can look back with a high degree of accuracy. The problem, is no longer that someone is "watching you". Its worse. The problem is that someone, one day, could watch your entire life. Then proceed to pull apart events and use them, mostly out of context, against you. I wouldn't call myself paranoid. I'm not doing anything about it. Honestly, if the data was only retained a month, unless needed in a current investigation, I would agree with you, this wouldn't be worth mentioning. However, retention of data is cheap and the data of your life will probably outlast you. As such, the parent posters in this convo have a point, it is something worth giving attention to. PS. And to be quite honest, I don't even care that they can look back at my life and scrutinize me for an email or two. The real fear is that they can pull specific quotes or life choices out of context. You as an individual can't even discredit them because you don't have access to the original files (unless the entity does you a favor and shares them with you). So you can show how innocent the same email quote or life choice is while in context. You are instead left with your memory, and hopefully powerful rhetoric to convince a jury you are innocent.
martythemaniak 13y ago
This is essentially putting a Kinect in your phone and hooking it up with hopefully high-level APIs. It may take 2-3 years to make it into regular phones, but when it does it will be huge. Apple's acquisition of PrimeSense (the makers of the 1st gen Kinect) means they're also working on this. To give you a real-world example: when I started BarSsense (http://www.barsense.com http://www.barsense.com) the core problem was tracking the path and velocity of a weightlifter's bar. I bought a PrimeSense camera because it can extract a lot more data and with greater accuracy out of an image than a regular camera. After some prototyping, I decided to use a 2D camera and deliver the software as an app because I thought wide distribution and ease of use was more important than the fidelity and correctness of the data - ie, the "worse is better" approach. When these cameras make their way into regular phones, "worse is better" will suddenly become "better".
- evanlivingston 13y ago
  I don't understand the application beyond gaming. The other applications discussed are basically shopping. Essentially this would make it much easier to represent the physical world digitally. But what use cases does a consumer or the average phone user have for digital representations of the physical space around them, particularly given that the user is already aware of the the physical space around them? How can this sort of digital device extend our ability to interact with physical space?
  - serf 13y ago
    the blind. that use case is even demonstrated in the video.
    - evanlivingston 13y ago
      Ocular implants are not the newest technology. The argument I think would be that a phone would be a cheaper alternative/more accessible. But I'm interested if the 'audio cues' that they mention in the video would be any better than the audio cues already present in most environments.
Keyframe 13y ago
With enough precision this could work really well for set extensions/reconstruction.
belgianguy 13y ago
I like the mapping ability, imagine mapping out your house and be able to use it as a level in a game, like walking on your ceiling with Oculus Rift.
bambax 13y ago
> updating it’s position and orientation in real-time ITS NOT IT'S
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  Or, you could reword your comment (which I upvoted): It's not "it's"! It's "its".
snotrockets 13y ago
I wonder if Google has a stack of experimental projects to release whenever a competitor announces some headline grabbing news.
- chaz 13y ago
  PR works better when you don't compete with competitors for attention. You either beat them to the headlines, or you wait a couple of days to find a clearing. This announcement is interesting, but not nearly the scale of WhatsApp/FB. An exception might be if you have a very similar announcement. Doing so would get you included in the same articles as your competitor.
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    >announcement is interesting, but not nearly the scale of WhatsApp/FB. Wait, what? Why would Google view the WhatsApp news as competitive? Other than it setting an insane price and inflating bubbles more, how is the FB acquisition really useful news to anyone? This tech will have far more impact on the world. Apart from the few people doing startups, FB buying WhatsApp will have almost zero impact in day-to-day lives.
    - chaz 13y ago
      > FB buying WhatsApp will have almost zero impact in day-to-day lives. I was only responding in the context of parent's PR comment, re: scale of press worthiness of the day. Tech sites have been covering WhatsApp/FB non-stop for the past 24 hrs. As for impact on the world, this is just a call for developers. I'm encouraged by the ambition, but it's too hard to judge if this will be successful. FB/WhatsApp will almost immediately affect 400M users (+1M more per day).
- dannyr 13y ago
  Or maybe it's the other way around. Facebook got some news that Google is about to announce an ambitious, experimental project so they preempt it by buying WhatsApp for billions of dollars. /sarcasm
return0 13y ago
Cool technology and all, but i find that it is an odd fit for phones. Apart from games and other gimmicky applications, or exceptional cases like navigation for the blind, what are the awesome applications of space detection for a phone? I can think of much more interesting applications in mobile devices like cars.
- icefox 13y ago
  Think of a phone not as a phone, but more like a really cheap way to have a portable computer with a screen and battery that you can put sensors on. It comes in the phone package because the industry is very much geared to churning out that form factor on the cheap. Edit: and you can duck tape it to [car|bike|ect].
Pro_bity 13y ago
Forget the phone, this is technology is ideal to merge into Google Glass.
- hellbanTHIS 13y ago
  Google Glass: now with Spider-Sense!
k-mcgrady 13y ago
Really cool. I love how this could help the blind (my first thought when I saw how it worked - glad it was acknowledged in the video as a use case). The stuff Google's working on (and the face they're making it public is really exciting me (this, Glass, contact lens etc.). The more I see the more I think I'm going to spend more time developing for Google's platforms and less time developing for Apple's. I'm sure Apple has a few cool projects they'll be sharing this year but Google seems to be the one pushing the boundaries.
- connerdc 13y ago
  Since you mentioned it here is a project I'm working on with blind and visually impaired users with Glass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDg0k1HsH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDg0k1HsH8 and I'm interested in extending it using something like tango.
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    Excellent work. Tango would make this incredibly powerful although I wonder how long it'll take to get those sensors packed into Glass.
SiVal 13y ago
"Imagine measuring your room by just walking around in it." Yes, and imagine transmitting each of those footsteps in real time back to Google, so they can have a map of your room, too, in case they, or other parties, ever need it. I was just having a discussion yesterday with a friend who works at Google about what data they store when you query their search engine. Every single keystroke, including backspaces, is stored. They don't just know what you ask. They know how well you can spell and know how well you type, not just in general but down to specific letter sequences. With this data, they can tell if you are regularly more impaired (fine motor control) at some times than at others, or if you're growing more impaired over time and match that against the content of your queries, etc. "Phones that don't limit their boundaries to a touchscreen", meaning, we're not satisfied limiting our knowledge of you to just what we can extract from what you enter and how you enter it and when on a touchscreen. We want to know every step you take, when you sit, when you stand, how and where you walk.... SO much more data about you and your world that we can mine for treasure! I'm not saying that Google is evil. My friends at Google certainly aren't. It's just that they are like kids in a candy store with unprecedented access to data and so many great, new algorithms for extracting information from it that they are just loving it, the way geeks would. But we're really going down a rabbit hole here.
- sixothree 13y ago
  I don't think it's a coincidence that every new product announced by Google involves surrendering more and more personal information to them. Just once I would love to be proven wrong. But Google just seems like the neediest, clingiest, nosiest spouse one could ever have.
  - psbp 13y ago
    What's the disconnect between Google's value and the information they gather. Obviously that's intentional most of the time, but it doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.
  - batmansbelt 13y ago
    There is no need to throw in the casual sexism into your valid criticism. It diminishes your point.
twelvechairs 13y ago
This kind of technology will lead to very big changes in the surveying industry, which is big. Also will lead to open 3d city models (the next openstreetmap will be in 3d and textured - IMO gmaps and apple maps will lose out to this eventually) and real-estate models (see your apartment without actually visiting) which will lead to lnock-on effects for a range of other property industry fields. Academically - urban studies (a field mostly based on experience and conjecture) will benefit hugely from realistic 3d modelling...
jogzden 13y ago
I can see tech like this being used in the next Bond film. Every day, the advances in modern technology surprise and impress me. I love our line of work, where we can set our mind to something and just make it.
pbreit 13y ago
Some of these applications sound more promising than the user input applications Leap Motion has been touting. I bet there are massive commercial opportunities for technology like this.
ihsw 13y ago
I'm shocked by the distinct focus on fear and doubt about Google's intentions with this technology -- does it really matter that much? The rising tide lifts us all, and this technology can be ubiquitous within twenty years. Isn't that worth it?
- gkya 13y ago
  Google is enormously huge, and the breadth of their product line is jaw dropping. This fact causes the instant reaction of connecting every "innovation" that comes out of it to be connected to greed for more and hunger for data. This would be an overtly exciting Kickstarter project to find out about, but when it is from Google, the perception is that they are managing to invade one more market. They are the Internet, they have the half of cellphone market, they sell apps, books, CPU cycles, they sell Chromebooks, tablets, they make maps, they provide apps for chat, video conferencing, they've made an online office suite, they store your documents, they make the mobile OS that is sold on other company's mobile phones, they do mobile payment, they create programming languages, they employ Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, and probably the guy you envy the most, they have quantum computers and they do a sh*t load of other things that I can't bother to remember (Translate, Youtube, G+, Blogger, Groups, ...). It is not possible (for me, at least) to attach Google the childish excitement that two geeky weirdos with scruffy hair bear for their fundraiser. Google is now the hot kid in the school, who's tall, strong, handsome and athletic, who also plays guitar and is very successful at his exams, speaks three languages and represents his school in the drama festival, and also participates in the school band as whoever the guy who gets the most attention in a band. Innovation is good for science, but it is harmful to the collaborative efforts when it comes from companies that should've been saturated. When Google dies (like anything else), it will fell over the crowd that lives under it's shadow.
- wpietri 13y ago
  Did you ever read "The Transparent Society"? In that 1996 non-fiction book, sci-fi author David Brin suggested that the decreasing cost of data collection and storage gave us two basic paths. In one, data and data about access to data would be widely available, giving us an unprecedented level of citizen oversight of society. Think sunshine laws increased a thousandfold. In the other, access to data would be limited, and those who had the data would have incredible power. The kind of power that totalitarian states dreamed of but never achieved. Every Googler I've met, which at this point is quite a number, is a fine person. I trust them as individuals. But for my tastes, Google as a company is already more than sufficiently powerful. Power corrupts. Power attracts the corrupt. At this point, I think everything new they do should be treated with suspicion. Not hostility, but with the same sort of scrutiny that we should monitor every other dominant megacorp.
jankeromnes 13y ago
s/updating it’s position/updating its position/
pazimzadeh 13y ago
This should be interesting to the guys who made Minecraft Reality. http://13thlab.com/ http://13thlab.com/ http://minecraftreality.com/ http://minecraftreality.com/
- trippy_biscuits 13y ago
  So how long will it be before someone can take a picture of a person and find all the similar matches on Tinder modulo any profile preferences and desired attributes? Maybe save it for later and use it in a completely different location? In other words, take a picture and then have an app that finds as many matches for that person all while applying any filter preferences the user has in his or her own profile. One person may see exciting matching opportunities. Others may use these modern technology aids in becoming the ultimate modern predator. It's one thing when you want to find a great date. It's quite another when someone uses it to find your son or daughter.
iceIX 13y ago
Interesting to see that this is coming from ATAP - the one part of Motorola that Google kept in the sale to Lenovo[1]. I was curious to see if they would merge the ATAP group into Google X, but I guess they're going to keep it separate and just rebrand it as Google ATAP. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/29/5359068/google-keeping-motorola-advanced-technology-group-project-ara-phone http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/29/5359068/google-keeping-mot...
radley 13y ago
Isn't the next win turning your house / apartment into a game world / holodeck using something like this together with an Oculus Rift? Household layout and furniture are mapped out, then re-textured to represent a castle, evil lair, enemy corporation, etc. Textures can update allowing the story to reuse each room as different places as you progress - the same way the holodeck area is actually small but uses optical illusions to give you a sense of greater mobility. Not saying we have holodeck. But it's a step towards.
tunesmith 13y ago
Fun to imagine this tech being put into a contact lens.
mrbill 13y ago
Surely I'm not the only Charlie Stross fan who immediately thought "SCORPION STARE"...
benhirashima 13y ago
It's great to see mobile 3D scanning receive validation from a major player like Google. My company, RealityCap, is working on bringing 3D scanning to mobile devices without the need for specialized 3D cameras. We use the sensors already present in smartphones: the camera (monocular), accelerometer, and gyroscope. That means that we can bring 3D scanning to millions of mobile devices that already exist. http://realitycap.com http://realitycap.com
rcthompson 13y ago
Ulterior motive: https://xkcd.com/1204/ https://xkcd.com/1204/
wegi 13y ago
I am a little bit disappointed, that I have to be part of a company to apply there. No time to work full time while doing my masters.
adamzerner 13y ago
I think the video made the mistake of focusing on features, and not benefits. (Not saying that the benefits aren't there, just that I personally don't see them, and the video didn't do a good job of making them apparent).
flyt 13y ago
Not a single woman in this entire video. edit: actually there's one I saw in the background as a camera pans over a table, but 99.9999% of the people represented here are men.
- uglycoyote 13y ago
  yeah, and I thought it was a bit odd that they were all sitting so close to one another
mbrameld 13y ago
I hope I can strap one on an RC plane or multi-rotor and map my neighborhood. That would be kind of cool.
pyvek 13y ago
Is anyone else getting 404? The requested URL /atap/projecttango/ was not found on this server. That’s all we know.
- clemsen 13y ago
  Same here...
- kfinley 13y ago
  Yes. Google Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VI0ttGWUYloJ:www.google.com/atap/projecttango/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VI0ttG... Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk
znowi 13y ago
GPS tracking + complete 3D environment history of your presence. I can imagine how NSA is excited :)
rasz_pl 13y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk#t=19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk#t=19 19 second mark shows they are using monocular structure from motion. Some Japanese Uni has a working solution(HDL inside FPGA) doing same thing too http://hackaday.com/2014/01/12/autonomous-quadcopter-fits-in-the-palm-of-your-hand/ http://hackaday.com/2014/01/12/autonomous-quadcopter-fits-in... you can try it yourself, code is on github https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E35xbo3r8rA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E35xbo3r8rA https://github.com/nymanjens/ardrone-exploration https://github.com/nymanjens/ardrone-exploration
ultimatedelman 13y ago
I think a game that maps your home or yard or street or whatever, recognizes common objects like trees, benches, cars, houses, people, etc, skins them with some sort of other-worldly skin, and allows you to walk around in the world finding virtual treasures and going on dynamic, virtual quests and fighting monsters by actually walking around would be the first literally fully-immersive game. incorporate events queued by actual sound coming in through the mic and you have the coolest game ever made, to date. think ingress, but overlaid in real time on what your camera sees and phone hears, instead of just on google maps.
deletes 13y ago
I understand the idea that you can get the exact positions of the surrounding, if you have an accurate position of the device. But how are they achieving that? I don't know of any such small tech capable of being accurate to 1cm, without external help. I don't see how can they do this without an accurate position of the device. An example when it breaks down without the position information: Pointing the device perpendicular at an uniformly colored wall and moving parallel to the wall. Then the visual information is undefined and you have to rely on very accurate position sensors( which don't exist ) to correctly scan the environment.
- fudged71 13y ago
  I'm sure tiny gyros and accelerometers have improved in the past couple years. They've probably advanced dead-reckoning using existing sensors. And maybe they can use both front and back cameras for position information.
  - deletes 13y ago
    But they haven't improved. Oculus is having these problems right now. Their best solution is having an additional camera looking at the user, and they have a much simpler task with a stationary user.
mendelk 13y ago
Getting a 404.
patrickaljord 13y ago
Funny, the official tagline of the project is "We like epic shit". http://i.imgur.com/mvcyUX4.png http://i.imgur.com/mvcyUX4.png https://plus.google.com/115422404677762786098/about https://plus.google.com/115422404677762786098/about
nikunjk 13y ago
404 error
- chengyang 13y ago
  where you get the 404?
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    I get one when clicking the submitted link.
- fs111 13y ago
  happens with firefox, works with chrome though
shanselman 13y ago
This is the return of Johnny Chung Lee! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist)
sirkneeland 13y ago
I swear you could just write a "HN comment generator" script for these sorts of articles: input: $new_google_tech output string: "$new_google_tech will let Google know more about you! I disapprove! Also, NSA." Repeat. Occasionally sprinkle with insightful comment about the actual technology being introduced.
- GrahamsNumber 13y ago
  Is that PHP? Kill him with fire!!111
tbenst 13y ago
My submission: 3D Printing is a big data problem where the data is not being collected. Sensors in desktop 3D printers are usually restricted to simple limit switches on the axes. We would use Project Tango for a real-time feedback system for 3D Printing. Initially, we would demonstrate a simple functionality: recognizing when a print is failing and instructing the machine to stop, rather than waste more material. Next, with the help of the open-source community, we would expand functionality to dynamically adjust machine instructions to compensate/fix problems observed during the print. Here are a few examples: - adjust bed height for different layer heights via software rather than manual hardware tinkering - dynamically change extrusion rate if underextrusion/overextrusion is observed - detect if belts are slipping & correct extruder positioning - pause print is no filament is extruding - intelligently resume print if stopped (e.g. power failure) - inform slicing software if/where/why a print fails so the software can reslice and repeat properly For users, no new hardware will be needed besides Project Tango - a computer will stream GCODE instructions via USB to a RepRap-like 3D printer (e.g. Makerbot, Ultimaker, etc.). Project Tango is precisely the breakthrough we have been waiting for to make 3D printing more user friendly.
- aw3c2 13y ago
  You can do that right now with a gazillion of applications that do photogrammetry. Project Tango is nothing new per se. Just add a stereoscopic camera, choose software and add the analysis/decision-making. Some links to get you started: http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/ http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/ http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~snavely/bundler/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~snavely/bundler/ http://www.arc-team.homelinux.com/arcteam/ppt.php http://www.arc-team.homelinux.com/arcteam/ppt.php http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/ngt/stereo/ http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/ngt/ste...
infocollector 13y ago
Paracosm as partner? Isnt this exactly what the paracosm startup was doing? Does anyone know the story?
ulyssesgrant 13y ago
As someone who's worked on visual odometry projects before, I'm extremely interested in how they're able to compute the phone's motion estimations so accurately and in real time on a mobile device. Is any of this project open source? Is anyone here familiar with the vision techniques they're using to accomplish this feat? Perhaps there's an FPGA or ASIC designed for visual odometry inside the phone.
- siera 13y ago
  It uses a Myriad 1 processor from Movidius http://www.movidius.com/tango http://www.movidius.com/tango. It's a custom media coprocessor aimed at mobile devices. I found more information about the processor architecture in these slides : http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/HC23.19.8-Video/HC23.19.811-1TOPS-Media-Moloney-Movidius.pdf http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/... Edit : Video of the talk associated with the slides http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiTaPRtN2yM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiTaPRtN2yM
  - ulyssesgrant 13y ago
    Thanks for the info. Still very impressed with the speed and accuracy, assuming it works as well as they have presented. To be able to compute visual odometry in an arbitrary scene on a mobile device seems like a really big accomplishment, no?
    - siera 13y ago
      Visual odometry is getting quite accurate. For example, it is used on the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) to improve the position obtained from wheel odometry [1]. As you mentionned, the big accomplishment is doing this in real time on a mobile device. On a typical mobile ARM processor, it would probably be very slow and drain the battery in no time. That's why they are using a custom coprocessor designed specifically for image processing and computer vision. The next challenge is porting the existing visual odometry algorithms on this new processor. It looks like hiDOF did the implementation [2]. [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rob.20184/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rob.20184/abstrac... [2] http://hidof.com/projects/project-tango/ http://hidof.com/projects/project-tango/
ejstembler 13y ago
Pretty much all junk and ancient looking. It's sad this genre has not advanced.
boucherm 13y ago
Argh, this is my phd subject. Not sure wether this is good (for the lights) or bad news... What do you think?
bzalasky 13y ago
Looks cool. This reminds me of what Dekko was working on while they were still in business, though I suppose at Google scale.
kamaal 13y ago
This is really amazing. This is basically the stepping stone for 'self driving car' equivalent applications for indoors. One wonders what Google is upto. Big investments in AI research, and then things like this. You could build domestic robots to do all sorts for work with a technology like this. And I'm not just talking of toys or games here. The very nature of consumer electronics can be redefined with technologies like these. Something to think of: 2015: -> By now, it is likely that "clean a house" will be within the capabilities of a household robot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...
z3phyr 13y ago
Couple it with neuromorphic engineering, and we have a good robot AI technology in our hands!!!!
chacham15 13y ago
I can see this being HUGE in the real estate market. Imagine if a house seller can walk through his house with one of these, then upload the data to a website and now you can have a truly online "open house".
- User8712 13y ago
  How is this different than say, walking around your house with your smart phone recording video, and then pushing a button to upload it to your real estate ad? Advantage Tango: The user could manually navigate the virtual house. Advantage Standard Video: Improved accuracy, no wonky 3D model and texture recreations, but actual video. Runs on low end hardware, no fancy plugins required. You can turn on lights, open drawers, show how a sliding door works, or how the fridge looks inside. If I had my choice, I'd take video over Tango for real estate. Even so, video has been around for ages, it's dead simple to create and upload, yet never used. Therefore, if video hasn't taken off in the past decade, I can't see Tango having any noticeable impact on the market.
archagon 13y ago
Space detection is very exciting to me, but this feels like a technological stopgap. Is there any research being done into "blind" space detection, that doesn't require the use of cameras? Is that even possible? It would be amazing if I could have my phone in my pocket and (for example) adjust the rotation of a nearby camera based solely on my hand gestures.
runewell 13y ago
Did I understand this correctly, will this actually map onto virtual Earth geometry at the same position and scale as real-life? That would be amazing, you would literally be able to use Google Maps to walk inside buildings and look around not to mention it could be the first Earth-accurate metaverse. Imagine sitting down with a more advanced pair of Google glasses and being able to see both your real-life environment and its identical online copy with virtual avatars navigating the hallways along with your real-life co-workers.
stefek99 13y ago
Contest finished at the moment it is started? http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/terms/ http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/terms/ "The Contest begins at 12:00:00 A.M. Pacific Time (PT) Zone in the United States on February 19th, 2014" "On or about February 19th, 2014, each Essay will be evaluated by the Judges." #memonkey
Allower 13y ago
This is not creepy at all...
TophWells 13y ago
Here's the application I thought was immediately obvious: memory palaces. Based on the old mnemonic trick of taking a real physical location that you know well, and associating memories with objects in that space. The digital version of this would be having files and data stored in a "physical" place - although they're not solid, they'd be tied to a single location. Harder to organise, but I know several people who have completely filled their computer's desktop with shortcuts, because they don't like futzing around with folders. The folder metaphor isn't the be-all and end-all, there are times when it's appropriate and times when it's not. The metaphor of icons that are dragged around the screen is limited by available screen space - Project Tango gives you a house-sized (or even just room-sized) 3D space to play with, more than enough for all the files you could need to be immediately visible. The main risk is that my virtual room could end up as messy as my real room. I don't know how anyone could make money from this, but it would be really damn cool.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
Applied for our local Hackerspace. I hope Google will consider applications not only from companies, but from community R&D labs as well :).
cmollis 13y ago
awesome. I continue to be amazed at Google's breadth of ambition. If it works, which I assume it mostly does, I think it will be beneficial to most. Some (perhaps even some division of Google itself), will do something totally asinine and attempt to subvert the original intents of the engineers and designers who are currently involved. But that's what happens with any new technology that broadens access and visibility. I don't believe anything Google does is inherently 'evil' on its face.. unfortunately, given their reach, they are a natural access point for some federal agencies to execute their primary tasks, as they fall under the same vague, broadly defined national security laws as we all do. The only difference is that we don't run the Internet and its major consumer touch points. Google does and they need to make money from their capital investments. It would be smart to use it and do something cool.
cynusx 13y ago
Generating CS maps from the university campus now becomes ridiculously simple :)
mixerjoe 13y ago
Cool would be if this mixed-reality game here would be on Tango: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gbanga-famiglia-rise-and-fall-game/x/5121343 http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gbanga-famiglia-rise-and-f...
arjn 13y ago
Anyone recall the mapping drones from the recent Ridley Scott film "Prometheus" ? (similar concepts in other films too I think) Combine this with a small smart-ish drone and it could get very interesting.
web007 13y ago
This is the embodiment of the phone-scanner-mapping thing from The Dark Knight. Fascinating!
hope1985 13y ago
Great idea! I think it can be very helpful to navigate blind people.
ingend88 13y ago
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815 points by psbp 13y ago

Google needs more data so that Google Maps can map the inside of your house. :-)

That link seems dead to me. This article has more info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272849 http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/google-launches-project-tango/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/20/google-launches-project-tan...

jcoleh 13y ago

Google's answer to iBeacons?

Synaesthesia 13y ago
Totally different. iBeacons are a low power Bluetooth transmitter that can notify phones of their presence. This is a prototype phone for mapping scenes in 3D

d0 13y ago

Is it just latent paranoia, or can I just see evil uses for this?

carbocation 13y ago
Every new technology, as well as every old technology, can be used for "good" or for "evil." More broadly, many activities to which "goodness" can be assigned will vary in "goodness" based on the context (in many ethical systems).
gus_massa 13y ago
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1215/ http://xkcd.com/1215/

ok_craig 13y ago

This technology inside Google Glass would be pretty killer.

psbp 13y ago
The first thing I imagined is a wearable with a clicker for the blind. You say navigate me to ___, and the clicker gives you hot and cold signals (lots of feedback vs. less) as well as maybe a buzzing feedback if you're approaching a hazard.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  You could apply current directly to your head to provide necessary signals, similar to how tDCS works. No buzzing required.
sailfast 13y ago
As long as it's in the phone, couldn't you tether it to Google Glass to generate a real-time HUD based on where you were? (and perhaps also capture images to attach to the 3D model) That was the first thing I thought about - actual augmented reality down to the inch would be quite something.
- Crito 13y ago
  With future versions of Google Glass perhaps. The current version does not have a display that can provide a HUD in the way that it seems you are thinking.
- omn 13y ago
  You don't have to tie it to google glass. You can make the phone itself serve as 'window' onto the "down to the inch" augmented reality.
- rmc 13y ago
  It relies on some hardware sensors which are in the phone.

Hermel 13y ago

I'm looking forward to the first first-person shooter built on Tango. E.g. a ghostbusters game in which you walk around in your own house, the ghosts only being visible through your Tango.

Nate630 13y ago
Good idea! :)
bryogenic 13y ago
How about tactical coordination and mapping for teams (i.e. paintball / special operations)? I'm picturing the HUD 'map' from every FPS game, except it is based on the current view and relative locations of the team's devices.
- cwe 13y ago
  This will eventually (hopefully?) get integrated into Glass, and provide that kind of HUD some have been waiting for.
- JshWright 13y ago
  How about a HUD that projects a map onto a firefighter's SCBA facepice? That would be absolutely incredible... Firefighters die every year because they get disoriented and lost in zero-visibility conditions. Even if it didn't have a pre-generated map of the structure loaded... it could build a map as it went, and at least be able to provide a 'retrace my steps' view.
  - Crito 13y ago
    I wonder at what point ITAR kicks in for that sort of firefighter equipment. I know traditional night-vision is covered, and I can certainly see "smoke-vision" having straightforward military applications.
    - JshWright 13y ago
      This is an issue with current firefighting technology. Thermal imaging cameras are quite common in the fire service. Most manufacturers limit the frame rate of the camera to 9fps or less, as this falls beneath the 'fast camera' spec for ITAR.

atburrow 13y ago

It would be very interesting to see an application for this using Glass. Could this potentially help blind people navigate in unknown environments?

georgemcbay 13y ago
Yeah it could be used for that, though I'm not sure why Google Glass would be used in that situation. A chest strap to mount the device looking forward and maybe headphones in the blind user's ears (to speak out TTS directions, or even just tones which represent directions) would be a better feedback mechanism.
- atburrow 13y ago
  I agree. I suppose a Google Glass would be a bit silly since the screen would be unused, but seeing as it has most of the technology built in already, it would be easier to get a prototype working. An ear piece is another bonus added to the device as it could notify the user of obstacles.

roycehaynes 13y ago

Tango looks a lot like The Structure Sensor by Occipital - http://structure.io/ http://structure.io/

rch 13y ago
I still like that Occipital is planning to ship a standalone unit, and support people wanting to 3D print various housings. I guess the positive interpretation is that crowdfunding seems to be putting some pressure on larger companies to go public with research projects earlier than they normally would.
rasz_pl 13y ago
its not, structure.io is using Primesense sensor. Tango appears to be doing structure from motion

fidotron 13y ago

If you were to build an Android powered robot isn't this exactly what you'd need inside it?

Aoyagi 13y ago

Every time something new comes out from Google or Microsoft, I just wait to see where is the catch. There is always the catch.

aquadrop 13y ago
Now Google wants to index whole physical world, with help of millions of smartphones.
nivla 13y ago
I guess the catch in this would be that they get to integrate the public scans with Google Maps and/or help train Google Glass about the surroundings.

Nogwater 13y ago

Could this do real-time position, rotation, and gesture tracking if it was embedded in a VR head-mounted display?

gamegoblin 13y ago

I wonder if it uses the machine vision aspect to prevent the typical problem of accelerometer drift. e.g. by orienting itself relative to walls/other stationary things. Also, imagine making a 3D "scanner" that you can scan objects with into a virtual world, or print out on a 3D printer.

gallamine 13y ago
Accelerometers usually don't have significant drift - digital gyroscopes do. The acceleromters are quite noisy though (and measure both gravity and acceleration). From some of the brief images in the intro movie it looks like the cameras are doing tracking and alignment of "interesting" features. Things like that fall into the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology area. Very cool stuff.
- boucherm 13y ago
  Well, maybe was I just unlucky, but I tried to use an IMU for my SLAM and was shocked by the extravagant amount of drift of accelerometers.
  - greendestiny 13y ago
    Do you mean the accelerometer values drifted over time (i.e. the direction of gravity shifted on a stable accelerometer) or do you mean the value when doubly integrated drifted?
    - boucherm 13y ago
      Right: the doubly integrated values shifted while the sensor didn't move.
      - boucherm 13y ago
        *drifted

jlas 13y ago

"Unfortunately, due to FCC restrictions, we can only send development units to incorporated entities or institutions at this time." That's a bummer. Also, the page's default background-color should be set to black (or something dark). Most of the text is white(ish) and with a slow connection the background images take a while to load, making it impossible to read while you wait. /rant

cakeface 13y ago
This is a little creepy actually when you think about it. Here is this amazing new technology and the government says that only corporations are allowed to possess it. I'm sure that there are reasons but on the face of it I feel like it is right out of a cyberpunk book.
- MattGrommes 13y ago
  It's probably because sending to a company can fit under testing purposes but going to a person needs to be more rigorously controlled for interference and the like. Still, an unfortunate and old fashioned restriction in today's culture.
- stan_rogers 13y ago
  That just indicates that it hasn't passed Class B certification yet (under Title 47 CFR Part 15), which basically means that as an unintentional RF radiator (that is, at least in part not an intentional radiocommunication device), it hasn't yet been shown not to interfere with other devices. Even the wall wart for charging your phone needs to meet Class B in order to be sold or supplied for household use.
throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
I suspect a single-person LLC would count, and in most states (other than CA) you can set that up for less than the cost of a phone. http://www.andysirkin.com/GetDocument.cfm?Resource=224&Hit=1 http://www.andysirkin.com/GetDocument.cfm?Resource=224&Hit=1 [this is not legal advice]
- 13y ago

epmatsw 13y ago

Makes me think of the arm computers from the Neanderthal Parallax. I'd love to get my hands on one of these

pinaceae 13y ago

interesting that they built this into a phone. but i guess once you need a mobile computing device with a screen and a camera you end up with a "phone" nowadays. the reliance on lenses is a hinderance though as it has two and holding it without covering them both requires user effort. you can see it at the end of their video where a finger is partially over the second lens. still, exciting!

salgernon 13y ago
Surely the right place for this is in a google glass. Or at that point, given the sensors required, a google helmet.

_random_ 13y ago

"written in Java, C/C++, as well as the Unity Game Engine" - good news and a discreet way of saying they support C# via Mono!

pjmlp 13y ago
Except you can't really use Unity for standard line of business applications and their Mono runtime is stuck in .NET 3.5 land.
- _random_ 13y ago
  I personally don't like Unity, but at least Google is starting to think out of the mainstream OSS box.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    I was looking forward to the FOSDEM talk about ART, but they cancelled it. The only thing we can infer from the public source code is that it has been enabled by default for whatever might be the next release. So no news if with ART, other languages could be better supported or not.

kodablah 13y ago

Here's the best idea I can think of with this technology. Imagine taking a scan of your pantry, refrigerator, and/or laundry room. Then mark everything as what it is (e.g. "box of cheez-its", "milk", etc). Then come back a few days and do the scan again and it'll tell you what's missing. Once you return from shopping, scan again saying what the new items are (even if they aren't what was there). The software would probably need to recognize certain shapes so a slight rearrangement/movement doesn't change. It'd be like history/bookmarks/favorites for perishables!

lttlrck 13y ago
If it's already missing it needed replacing yesterday.
nivla 13y ago
Isn't it much easier to just look into your refrigerator/pantry and keep a mental track of things? There are a few pitfalls to your suggested method: * It takes a good amount of time scanning and cataloging everything and we are taking about a world where people don't find enough time to scribble down these things on a piece of paper. * What if you pulled out cereal box A and cereal box B but switched places when putting them back? * Since its scanning the boundary of objects, it won't be able to tell you if your Milk is empty, half empty or full. The one thing I could think of where this is useful is in scanning rooms/objects which are for sale. Like 3d scanning the bike you are going to sell, or a realtor using it to provide a virtual 3d tour of a house. However, Microsoft already did it with their Photosynth program and regular photos you take [1], so I am not sure how this is going to fair if it turns out to be expensive. [1] http://photosynth.net/ http://photosynth.net/
- maxerickson 13y ago
  I think the automated fridge/pantry will be sort of useless right up until the point where it becomes seamless. Then it will just be a nice convenience, not a big deal. But that describes huge swaths of technology, so go figure.
- kodablah 13y ago

magicalist 13y ago

"- Johnny Lee and the ATAP-Project Tango Team" Johnny Lee was the guy with the awesome Wii Controller demos back in 2007 (can't believe it's been that long). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw edit: here's the full set of demos: http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ (also, I'm assuming it's the same guy, but his site says he's at Google now)

yelnatz 13y ago
I am so happy to see a familiar face when I played the video. Back in 07/08 when he demoed his hacks in TED it really blew my mind. [1] I was really hoping someone would pick him up and let him loose on some projects. I guess Google did just that. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H1zrLZwPjQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H1zrLZwPjQ
- bradyd 13y ago
  He worked on the Kinect project at Microsoft as well. In fact he put up the prize money for the Open Kinect contest run by Adafruit to develop drivers for the Kinect. http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/windows-drivers-for-kinect.html http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/windows-drivers...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
balls187 13y ago
Pretty awesome to see what he's been up too.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
I was Google when they were trying to hire him, he turned them down to go work at Microsoft. Its interesting to see him at Google these days. I was really inspired by his projector/Wii hacks. I even built a couple with some of those pico projector units that Woot gets now and then for $100. My interest was building a simpler structured scanner for doing 3D printing.

skywhopper 13y ago

I wish I could go back to the time when I thought this kind of thing was awesome. Nowadays, it's just one more aspect of our private lives that'll be stored on Google's (or whomever) servers, sold to advertisers, harvested by the NSA, and abused by law enforcement. Add some object recognition to the 3D scanning, and you can start getting marketing messages about how much better [Featured Brand]'s refrigerator would suit your needs, courts will rule that no reasonable person would expect the interior contents of their house to be private and require a search warrant, and the DEA will be able to find something that looks enough like drug paraphenalia in the images from anyone's home to justify a home invasion of whoever their preferred target of the moment is.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- mempko 13y ago
  It isn't paranoia if they are actually watching you.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - yazaddaruvala 13y ago
      The problem is also that, "watching you" is a bad analogy. It implies, like you mention, that the entity has to prioritize who/what they "watch". This is a bad analogy because unlike humans, who can't watch historic events and therefore can only speculate at them (not held up in court), these entities can look back with a high degree of accuracy. The problem, is no longer that someone is "watching you". Its worse. The problem is that someone, one day, could watch your entire life. Then proceed to pull apart events and use them, mostly out of context, against you. I wouldn't call myself paranoid. I'm not doing anything about it. Honestly, if the data was only retained a month, unless needed in a current investigation, I would agree with you, this wouldn't be worth mentioning. However, retention of data is cheap and the data of your life will probably outlast you. As such, the parent posters in this convo have a point, it is something worth giving attention to. PS. And to be quite honest, I don't even care that they can look back at my life and scrutinize me for an email or two. The real fear is that they can pull specific quotes or life choices out of context. You as an individual can't even discredit them because you don't have access to the original files (unless the entity does you a favor and shares them with you). So you can show how innocent the same email quote or life choice is while in context. You are instead left with your memory, and hopefully powerful rhetoric to convince a jury you are innocent.

martythemaniak 13y ago

This is essentially putting a Kinect in your phone and hooking it up with hopefully high-level APIs. It may take 2-3 years to make it into regular phones, but when it does it will be huge. Apple's acquisition of PrimeSense (the makers of the 1st gen Kinect) means they're also working on this. To give you a real-world example: when I started BarSsense (http://www.barsense.com http://www.barsense.com) the core problem was tracking the path and velocity of a weightlifter's bar. I bought a PrimeSense camera because it can extract a lot more data and with greater accuracy out of an image than a regular camera. After some prototyping, I decided to use a 2D camera and deliver the software as an app because I thought wide distribution and ease of use was more important than the fidelity and correctness of the data - ie, the "worse is better" approach. When these cameras make their way into regular phones, "worse is better" will suddenly become "better".

evanlivingston 13y ago
I don't understand the application beyond gaming. The other applications discussed are basically shopping. Essentially this would make it much easier to represent the physical world digitally. But what use cases does a consumer or the average phone user have for digital representations of the physical space around them, particularly given that the user is already aware of the the physical space around them? How can this sort of digital device extend our ability to interact with physical space?
- serf 13y ago
  the blind. that use case is even demonstrated in the video.
  - evanlivingston 13y ago
    Ocular implants are not the newest technology. The argument I think would be that a phone would be a cheaper alternative/more accessible. But I'm interested if the 'audio cues' that they mention in the video would be any better than the audio cues already present in most environments.

Keyframe 13y ago

With enough precision this could work really well for set extensions/reconstruction.

belgianguy 13y ago

I like the mapping ability, imagine mapping out your house and be able to use it as a level in a game, like walking on your ceiling with Oculus Rift.

bambax 13y ago

> updating it’s position and orientation in real-time ITS NOT IT'S

72deluxe 13y ago
Or, you could reword your comment (which I upvoted): It's not "it's"! It's "its".

snotrockets 13y ago

I wonder if Google has a stack of experimental projects to release whenever a competitor announces some headline grabbing news.

chaz 13y ago
PR works better when you don't compete with competitors for attention. You either beat them to the headlines, or you wait a couple of days to find a clearing. This announcement is interesting, but not nearly the scale of WhatsApp/FB. An exception might be if you have a very similar announcement. Doing so would get you included in the same articles as your competitor.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  >announcement is interesting, but not nearly the scale of WhatsApp/FB. Wait, what? Why would Google view the WhatsApp news as competitive? Other than it setting an insane price and inflating bubbles more, how is the FB acquisition really useful news to anyone? This tech will have far more impact on the world. Apart from the few people doing startups, FB buying WhatsApp will have almost zero impact in day-to-day lives.
  - chaz 13y ago
    > FB buying WhatsApp will have almost zero impact in day-to-day lives. I was only responding in the context of parent's PR comment, re: scale of press worthiness of the day. Tech sites have been covering WhatsApp/FB non-stop for the past 24 hrs. As for impact on the world, this is just a call for developers. I'm encouraged by the ambition, but it's too hard to judge if this will be successful. FB/WhatsApp will almost immediately affect 400M users (+1M more per day).
dannyr 13y ago
Or maybe it's the other way around. Facebook got some news that Google is about to announce an ambitious, experimental project so they preempt it by buying WhatsApp for billions of dollars. /sarcasm

return0 13y ago

Cool technology and all, but i find that it is an odd fit for phones. Apart from games and other gimmicky applications, or exceptional cases like navigation for the blind, what are the awesome applications of space detection for a phone? I can think of much more interesting applications in mobile devices like cars.

icefox 13y ago
Think of a phone not as a phone, but more like a really cheap way to have a portable computer with a screen and battery that you can put sensors on. It comes in the phone package because the industry is very much geared to churning out that form factor on the cheap. Edit: and you can duck tape it to [car|bike|ect].

Pro_bity 13y ago

Forget the phone, this is technology is ideal to merge into Google Glass.

hellbanTHIS 13y ago
Google Glass: now with Spider-Sense!

k-mcgrady 13y ago

Really cool. I love how this could help the blind (my first thought when I saw how it worked - glad it was acknowledged in the video as a use case). The stuff Google's working on (and the face they're making it public is really exciting me (this, Glass, contact lens etc.). The more I see the more I think I'm going to spend more time developing for Google's platforms and less time developing for Apple's. I'm sure Apple has a few cool projects they'll be sharing this year but Google seems to be the one pushing the boundaries.

connerdc 13y ago
Since you mentioned it here is a project I'm working on with blind and visually impaired users with Glass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDg0k1HsH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDg0k1HsH8 and I'm interested in extending it using something like tango.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  Excellent work. Tango would make this incredibly powerful although I wonder how long it'll take to get those sensors packed into Glass.

SiVal 13y ago

"Imagine measuring your room by just walking around in it." Yes, and imagine transmitting each of those footsteps in real time back to Google, so they can have a map of your room, too, in case they, or other parties, ever need it. I was just having a discussion yesterday with a friend who works at Google about what data they store when you query their search engine. Every single keystroke, including backspaces, is stored. They don't just know what you ask. They know how well you can spell and know how well you type, not just in general but down to specific letter sequences. With this data, they can tell if you are regularly more impaired (fine motor control) at some times than at others, or if you're growing more impaired over time and match that against the content of your queries, etc. "Phones that don't limit their boundaries to a touchscreen", meaning, we're not satisfied limiting our knowledge of you to just what we can extract from what you enter and how you enter it and when on a touchscreen. We want to know every step you take, when you sit, when you stand, how and where you walk.... SO much more data about you and your world that we can mine for treasure! I'm not saying that Google is evil. My friends at Google certainly aren't. It's just that they are like kids in a candy store with unprecedented access to data and so many great, new algorithms for extracting information from it that they are just loving it, the way geeks would. But we're really going down a rabbit hole here.

sixothree 13y ago
I don't think it's a coincidence that every new product announced by Google involves surrendering more and more personal information to them. Just once I would love to be proven wrong. But Google just seems like the neediest, clingiest, nosiest spouse one could ever have.
- psbp 13y ago
  What's the disconnect between Google's value and the information they gather. Obviously that's intentional most of the time, but it doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.
- batmansbelt 13y ago
  There is no need to throw in the casual sexism into your valid criticism. It diminishes your point.

twelvechairs 13y ago

This kind of technology will lead to very big changes in the surveying industry, which is big. Also will lead to open 3d city models (the next openstreetmap will be in 3d and textured - IMO gmaps and apple maps will lose out to this eventually) and real-estate models (see your apartment without actually visiting) which will lead to lnock-on effects for a range of other property industry fields. Academically - urban studies (a field mostly based on experience and conjecture) will benefit hugely from realistic 3d modelling...

jogzden 13y ago

I can see tech like this being used in the next Bond film. Every day, the advances in modern technology surprise and impress me. I love our line of work, where we can set our mind to something and just make it.

pbreit 13y ago

Some of these applications sound more promising than the user input applications Leap Motion has been touting. I bet there are massive commercial opportunities for technology like this.

ihsw 13y ago

I'm shocked by the distinct focus on fear and doubt about Google's intentions with this technology -- does it really matter that much? The rising tide lifts us all, and this technology can be ubiquitous within twenty years. Isn't that worth it?

gkya 13y ago
Google is enormously huge, and the breadth of their product line is jaw dropping. This fact causes the instant reaction of connecting every "innovation" that comes out of it to be connected to greed for more and hunger for data. This would be an overtly exciting Kickstarter project to find out about, but when it is from Google, the perception is that they are managing to invade one more market. They are the Internet, they have the half of cellphone market, they sell apps, books, CPU cycles, they sell Chromebooks, tablets, they make maps, they provide apps for chat, video conferencing, they've made an online office suite, they store your documents, they make the mobile OS that is sold on other company's mobile phones, they do mobile payment, they create programming languages, they employ Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, and probably the guy you envy the most, they have quantum computers and they do a sh*t load of other things that I can't bother to remember (Translate, Youtube, G+, Blogger, Groups, ...). It is not possible (for me, at least) to attach Google the childish excitement that two geeky weirdos with scruffy hair bear for their fundraiser. Google is now the hot kid in the school, who's tall, strong, handsome and athletic, who also plays guitar and is very successful at his exams, speaks three languages and represents his school in the drama festival, and also participates in the school band as whoever the guy who gets the most attention in a band. Innovation is good for science, but it is harmful to the collaborative efforts when it comes from companies that should've been saturated. When Google dies (like anything else), it will fell over the crowd that lives under it's shadow.
wpietri 13y ago
Did you ever read "The Transparent Society"? In that 1996 non-fiction book, sci-fi author David Brin suggested that the decreasing cost of data collection and storage gave us two basic paths. In one, data and data about access to data would be widely available, giving us an unprecedented level of citizen oversight of society. Think sunshine laws increased a thousandfold. In the other, access to data would be limited, and those who had the data would have incredible power. The kind of power that totalitarian states dreamed of but never achieved. Every Googler I've met, which at this point is quite a number, is a fine person. I trust them as individuals. But for my tastes, Google as a company is already more than sufficiently powerful. Power corrupts. Power attracts the corrupt. At this point, I think everything new they do should be treated with suspicion. Not hostility, but with the same sort of scrutiny that we should monitor every other dominant megacorp.

jankeromnes 13y ago

s/updating it’s position/updating its position/

pazimzadeh 13y ago

This should be interesting to the guys who made Minecraft Reality. http://13thlab.com/ http://13thlab.com/ http://minecraftreality.com/ http://minecraftreality.com/

trippy_biscuits 13y ago
So how long will it be before someone can take a picture of a person and find all the similar matches on Tinder modulo any profile preferences and desired attributes? Maybe save it for later and use it in a completely different location? In other words, take a picture and then have an app that finds as many matches for that person all while applying any filter preferences the user has in his or her own profile. One person may see exciting matching opportunities. Others may use these modern technology aids in becoming the ultimate modern predator. It's one thing when you want to find a great date. It's quite another when someone uses it to find your son or daughter.

iceIX 13y ago

Interesting to see that this is coming from ATAP - the one part of Motorola that Google kept in the sale to Lenovo[1]. I was curious to see if they would merge the ATAP group into Google X, but I guess they're going to keep it separate and just rebrand it as Google ATAP. [1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/29/5359068/google-keeping-motorola-advanced-technology-group-project-ara-phone http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/29/5359068/google-keeping-mot...

radley 13y ago

Isn't the next win turning your house / apartment into a game world / holodeck using something like this together with an Oculus Rift? Household layout and furniture are mapped out, then re-textured to represent a castle, evil lair, enemy corporation, etc. Textures can update allowing the story to reuse each room as different places as you progress - the same way the holodeck area is actually small but uses optical illusions to give you a sense of greater mobility. Not saying we have holodeck. But it's a step towards.

tunesmith 13y ago

Fun to imagine this tech being put into a contact lens.

mrbill 13y ago

Surely I'm not the only Charlie Stross fan who immediately thought "SCORPION STARE"...

benhirashima 13y ago

It's great to see mobile 3D scanning receive validation from a major player like Google. My company, RealityCap, is working on bringing 3D scanning to mobile devices without the need for specialized 3D cameras. We use the sensors already present in smartphones: the camera (monocular), accelerometer, and gyroscope. That means that we can bring 3D scanning to millions of mobile devices that already exist. http://realitycap.com http://realitycap.com

rcthompson 13y ago

Ulterior motive: https://xkcd.com/1204/ https://xkcd.com/1204/

wegi 13y ago

I am a little bit disappointed, that I have to be part of a company to apply there. No time to work full time while doing my masters.

adamzerner 13y ago

I think the video made the mistake of focusing on features, and not benefits. (Not saying that the benefits aren't there, just that I personally don't see them, and the video didn't do a good job of making them apparent).

flyt 13y ago

Not a single woman in this entire video. edit: actually there's one I saw in the background as a camera pans over a table, but 99.9999% of the people represented here are men.

uglycoyote 13y ago
yeah, and I thought it was a bit odd that they were all sitting so close to one another

mbrameld 13y ago

I hope I can strap one on an RC plane or multi-rotor and map my neighborhood. That would be kind of cool.

pyvek 13y ago

Is anyone else getting 404? The requested URL /atap/projecttango/ was not found on this server. That’s all we know.

clemsen 13y ago
Same here...
kfinley 13y ago
Yes. Google Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VI0ttGWUYloJ:www.google.com/atap/projecttango/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VI0ttG... Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk

znowi 13y ago

GPS tracking + complete 3D environment history of your presence. I can imagine how NSA is excited :)

rasz_pl 13y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk#t=19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk#t=19 19 second mark shows they are using monocular structure from motion. Some Japanese Uni has a working solution(HDL inside FPGA) doing same thing too http://hackaday.com/2014/01/12/autonomous-quadcopter-fits-in-the-palm-of-your-hand/ http://hackaday.com/2014/01/12/autonomous-quadcopter-fits-in... you can try it yourself, code is on github https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E35xbo3r8rA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E35xbo3r8rA https://github.com/nymanjens/ardrone-exploration https://github.com/nymanjens/ardrone-exploration

ultimatedelman 13y ago

I think a game that maps your home or yard or street or whatever, recognizes common objects like trees, benches, cars, houses, people, etc, skins them with some sort of other-worldly skin, and allows you to walk around in the world finding virtual treasures and going on dynamic, virtual quests and fighting monsters by actually walking around would be the first literally fully-immersive game. incorporate events queued by actual sound coming in through the mic and you have the coolest game ever made, to date. think ingress, but overlaid in real time on what your camera sees and phone hears, instead of just on google maps.

deletes 13y ago

I understand the idea that you can get the exact positions of the surrounding, if you have an accurate position of the device. But how are they achieving that? I don't know of any such small tech capable of being accurate to 1cm, without external help. I don't see how can they do this without an accurate position of the device. An example when it breaks down without the position information: Pointing the device perpendicular at an uniformly colored wall and moving parallel to the wall. Then the visual information is undefined and you have to rely on very accurate position sensors( which don't exist ) to correctly scan the environment.

fudged71 13y ago
I'm sure tiny gyros and accelerometers have improved in the past couple years. They've probably advanced dead-reckoning using existing sensors. And maybe they can use both front and back cameras for position information.
- deletes 13y ago
  But they haven't improved. Oculus is having these problems right now. Their best solution is having an additional camera looking at the user, and they have a much simpler task with a stationary user.

mendelk 13y ago

Getting a 404.

patrickaljord 13y ago

Funny, the official tagline of the project is "We like epic shit". http://i.imgur.com/mvcyUX4.png http://i.imgur.com/mvcyUX4.png https://plus.google.com/115422404677762786098/about https://plus.google.com/115422404677762786098/about

nikunjk 13y ago

404 error

chengyang 13y ago
where you get the 404?
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  I get one when clicking the submitted link.
fs111 13y ago
happens with firefox, works with chrome though

shanselman 13y ago

This is the return of Johnny Chung Lee! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lee_(computer_scientist)

sirkneeland 13y ago

I swear you could just write a "HN comment generator" script for these sorts of articles: input: $new_google_tech output string: "$new_google_tech will let Google know more about you! I disapprove! Also, NSA." Repeat. Occasionally sprinkle with insightful comment about the actual technology being introduced.

GrahamsNumber 13y ago
Is that PHP? Kill him with fire!!111

tbenst 13y ago

My submission: 3D Printing is a big data problem where the data is not being collected. Sensors in desktop 3D printers are usually restricted to simple limit switches on the axes. We would use Project Tango for a real-time feedback system for 3D Printing. Initially, we would demonstrate a simple functionality: recognizing when a print is failing and instructing the machine to stop, rather than waste more material. Next, with the help of the open-source community, we would expand functionality to dynamically adjust machine instructions to compensate/fix problems observed during the print. Here are a few examples: - adjust bed height for different layer heights via software rather than manual hardware tinkering - dynamically change extrusion rate if underextrusion/overextrusion is observed - detect if belts are slipping & correct extruder positioning - pause print is no filament is extruding - intelligently resume print if stopped (e.g. power failure) - inform slicing software if/where/why a print fails so the software can reslice and repeat properly For users, no new hardware will be needed besides Project Tango - a computer will stream GCODE instructions via USB to a RepRap-like 3D printer (e.g. Makerbot, Ultimaker, etc.). Project Tango is precisely the breakthrough we have been waiting for to make 3D printing more user friendly.

aw3c2 13y ago
You can do that right now with a gazillion of applications that do photogrammetry. Project Tango is nothing new per se. Just add a stereoscopic camera, choose software and add the analysis/decision-making. Some links to get you started: http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/ http://insight3d.sourceforge.net/ http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ http://ccwu.me/vsfm/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~snavely/bundler/ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~snavely/bundler/ http://www.arc-team.homelinux.com/arcteam/ppt.php http://www.arc-team.homelinux.com/arcteam/ppt.php http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/ngt/stereo/ http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/tech/asr/intelligent-robotics/ngt/ste...

infocollector 13y ago

Paracosm as partner? Isnt this exactly what the paracosm startup was doing? Does anyone know the story?

ulyssesgrant 13y ago

As someone who's worked on visual odometry projects before, I'm extremely interested in how they're able to compute the phone's motion estimations so accurately and in real time on a mobile device. Is any of this project open source? Is anyone here familiar with the vision techniques they're using to accomplish this feat? Perhaps there's an FPGA or ASIC designed for visual odometry inside the phone.

siera 13y ago
It uses a Myriad 1 processor from Movidius http://www.movidius.com/tango http://www.movidius.com/tango. It's a custom media coprocessor aimed at mobile devices. I found more information about the processor architecture in these slides : http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/HC23.19.8-Video/HC23.19.811-1TOPS-Media-Moloney-Movidius.pdf http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc23/... Edit : Video of the talk associated with the slides http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiTaPRtN2yM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiTaPRtN2yM
- ulyssesgrant 13y ago
  Thanks for the info. Still very impressed with the speed and accuracy, assuming it works as well as they have presented. To be able to compute visual odometry in an arbitrary scene on a mobile device seems like a really big accomplishment, no?
  - siera 13y ago
    Visual odometry is getting quite accurate. For example, it is used on the Mars Exploration Rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) to improve the position obtained from wheel odometry [1]. As you mentionned, the big accomplishment is doing this in real time on a mobile device. On a typical mobile ARM processor, it would probably be very slow and drain the battery in no time. That's why they are using a custom coprocessor designed specifically for image processing and computer vision. The next challenge is porting the existing visual odometry algorithms on this new processor. It looks like hiDOF did the implementation [2]. [1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rob.20184/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rob.20184/abstrac... [2] http://hidof.com/projects/project-tango/ http://hidof.com/projects/project-tango/

ejstembler 13y ago

Pretty much all junk and ancient looking. It's sad this genre has not advanced.

boucherm 13y ago

Argh, this is my phd subject. Not sure wether this is good (for the lights) or bad news... What do you think?

bzalasky 13y ago

Looks cool. This reminds me of what Dekko was working on while they were still in business, though I suppose at Google scale.

kamaal 13y ago

This is really amazing. This is basically the stepping stone for 'self driving car' equivalent applications for indoors. One wonders what Google is upto. Big investments in AI research, and then things like this. You could build domestic robots to do all sorts for work with a technology like this. And I'm not just talking of toys or games here. The very nature of consumer electronics can be redefined with technologies like these. Something to think of: 2015: -> By now, it is likely that "clean a house" will be within the capabilities of a household robot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwei...

z3phyr 13y ago

Couple it with neuromorphic engineering, and we have a good robot AI technology in our hands!!!!

chacham15 13y ago

I can see this being HUGE in the real estate market. Imagine if a house seller can walk through his house with one of these, then upload the data to a website and now you can have a truly online "open house".

User8712 13y ago
How is this different than say, walking around your house with your smart phone recording video, and then pushing a button to upload it to your real estate ad? Advantage Tango: The user could manually navigate the virtual house. Advantage Standard Video: Improved accuracy, no wonky 3D model and texture recreations, but actual video. Runs on low end hardware, no fancy plugins required. You can turn on lights, open drawers, show how a sliding door works, or how the fridge looks inside. If I had my choice, I'd take video over Tango for real estate. Even so, video has been around for ages, it's dead simple to create and upload, yet never used. Therefore, if video hasn't taken off in the past decade, I can't see Tango having any noticeable impact on the market.

archagon 13y ago

Space detection is very exciting to me, but this feels like a technological stopgap. Is there any research being done into "blind" space detection, that doesn't require the use of cameras? Is that even possible? It would be amazing if I could have my phone in my pocket and (for example) adjust the rotation of a nearby camera based solely on my hand gestures.

runewell 13y ago

Did I understand this correctly, will this actually map onto virtual Earth geometry at the same position and scale as real-life? That would be amazing, you would literally be able to use Google Maps to walk inside buildings and look around not to mention it could be the first Earth-accurate metaverse. Imagine sitting down with a more advanced pair of Google glasses and being able to see both your real-life environment and its identical online copy with virtual avatars navigating the hallways along with your real-life co-workers.

stefek99 13y ago

Contest finished at the moment it is started? http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/terms/ http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/terms/ "The Contest begins at 12:00:00 A.M. Pacific Time (PT) Zone in the United States on February 19th, 2014" "On or about February 19th, 2014, each Essay will be evaluated by the Judges." #memonkey

Allower 13y ago

This is not creepy at all...

TophWells 13y ago

Here's the application I thought was immediately obvious: memory palaces. Based on the old mnemonic trick of taking a real physical location that you know well, and associating memories with objects in that space. The digital version of this would be having files and data stored in a "physical" place - although they're not solid, they'd be tied to a single location. Harder to organise, but I know several people who have completely filled their computer's desktop with shortcuts, because they don't like futzing around with folders. The folder metaphor isn't the be-all and end-all, there are times when it's appropriate and times when it's not. The metaphor of icons that are dragged around the screen is limited by available screen space - Project Tango gives you a house-sized (or even just room-sized) 3D space to play with, more than enough for all the files you could need to be immediately visible. The main risk is that my virtual room could end up as messy as my real room. I don't know how anyone could make money from this, but it would be really damn cool.

TeMPOraL 13y ago

Applied for our local Hackerspace. I hope Google will consider applications not only from companies, but from community R&D labs as well :).

cmollis 13y ago

awesome. I continue to be amazed at Google's breadth of ambition. If it works, which I assume it mostly does, I think it will be beneficial to most. Some (perhaps even some division of Google itself), will do something totally asinine and attempt to subvert the original intents of the engineers and designers who are currently involved. But that's what happens with any new technology that broadens access and visibility. I don't believe anything Google does is inherently 'evil' on its face.. unfortunately, given their reach, they are a natural access point for some federal agencies to execute their primary tasks, as they fall under the same vague, broadly defined national security laws as we all do. The only difference is that we don't run the Internet and its major consumer touch points. Google does and they need to make money from their capital investments. It would be smart to use it and do something cool.

cynusx 13y ago

Generating CS maps from the university campus now becomes ridiculously simple :)

mixerjoe 13y ago

Cool would be if this mixed-reality game here would be on Tango: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gbanga-famiglia-rise-and-fall-game/x/5121343 http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gbanga-famiglia-rise-and-f...

arjn 13y ago

Anyone recall the mapping drones from the recent Ridley Scott film "Prometheus" ? (similar concepts in other films too I think) Combine this with a small smart-ish drone and it could get very interesting.

web007 13y ago

This is the embodiment of the phone-scanner-mapping thing from The Dark Knight. Fascinating!

hope1985 13y ago

Great idea! I think it can be very helpful to navigate blind people.

ingend88 13y ago

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