"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!
Project Tango
21–30 of 353 posts
Re: Project Tango
#22Here'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!
Re: Project Tango
#23"- 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
edit: here's the full set of demos: http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ (also, I'm assuming it's the same guy, but his site says he's at Google now)
Re: Project Tango
#24Is it just latent paranoia, or can I just see evil uses for this?
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1215/
Re: Project Tango
#25Every time something new comes out from Google or Microsoft, I just wait to see where is the catch. There is always the catch .
Now Google wants to index whole physical world, with help of millions of smartphones.
Re: Project Tango
#26I 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.
Re: Project Tango
#27This 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) 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".
Re: Project Tango
#28I'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.
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.
Re: Project Tango
#29I 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.
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.
Re: Project Tango
#30Every time something new comes out from Google or Microsoft, I just wait to see where is the catch. There is always the catch .
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.