91–100 of 353 posts
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/29/5359068/google-keeping-mot...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 pr…
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 put…
"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 st…
What's the solution? Stop innovating because there's a slight chance of said innovation being used for evil? I'm all for being wary of what's going on, so that you don't get caught with your pants down, but what's the absolute worse that can happen? Every single tech that you can think of that has changed the world in some form, had it's own set of doomsayers, but as a whole I think we've progressed in the right dire…
The reason it doesn't happen is because corporations don't like giving up control of data that they can keep to themselves and store forever.
Many of these apps could run clientside and access the cloud solely for information, but that doesn't fit in with the Google vision of organizing the world's information and making it useful for selling products and services to advertisers.
Data retention and collection practices that prevent widespread spying must be codified into law for this to ever work. Companies, Google being the shining example, (but Apple and Facebook not far behind) will simply not enforce these boundaries upon themselves, because the data is just too valuable in the context of future algorithmic analysis.
Also, it's not a "slight chance". All these major innovations HAVE been used for evil, from mobile phones to wide-area networking to the web. It's not just fearmongering.
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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 t…
It's a path to huds, in the Deepness in the Sky sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky You need situational awareness in a device to start using it to paint data onto the surroundings. Once you can do that, a whole world of applications unlocks.
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 ) the core problem was tracking the path…
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 s…
The bad news is as you say: having mapping data of your private residence siphoned off by third parties, be it government or private industry.
I would say I'm as excited as I am worried about the potential for this technology. That said, I think the privacy implications are very similar to Kinect, which is already here. The only difference perhaps being mobility.
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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.
>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…
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).