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Project Tango

google.com

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Re: Project Tango

#311

Post by dagw »

aestra wrote: post #237
Gigablah wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has applications even for, uh, "normal" people. For example, online real estate portals. People who are house-hunting would probably appreciate floorplans or a 3D tour. Agents, landlords or property developers would be able to easily create those with their mobile device.

>Agents, landlords or property developers would be able to easily create those with their mobile device But they won't! It is very difficult to get those people to post more than a low res picture of one room online when they can very easily walk through the house with a video camera, for example. Even large apartment complexes have 1-2 pictures on their website and call it a day.

I'm currently house hunting (in Sweden) and most real estate agents go for full on visual overload. Everybody has at least 30+ 'artistic' photos. Most also have nice videos of the house on their site. Some even have clever 360 panorama thingies. I basically never watch them as they add nothing of value.

The single most important thing, for me, is a nice and correct 2D floor plan. Add to that 5-10 well chosen photos and you're done on the visual front as far as I'm concerned. If you haven't convinced to at least go look at the house with that, no video or interactive 3D model is going to change my mind.

The big problem is that the overlap between the information I consider important and the information the real estate agent is eager to share don't overlap all the much

Re: Project Tango

#312

Post by dualogy »

smikhanov wrote: post #290
janjongboom wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for one of the largest real estate portals in Europe, and people seldom watched the video of a property (if available). We also added floorplans from floorplanner.com and that converted way better. Now 25% of the listed properties has one.

To be honest, 25% is a very low number for such an essential piece of information about the property. Do you mind sharing how often people look at floor plans on your portal? I'm a Russian living in the UK and it still surprises me that what Russians consider to be a viable information about property (gross internal and net internal area, kitchen area and a floor plan) is so rarely present on the UK property sites. "…

That's because 99% of UK housing comes in a single standard size --- `XS`.

Re: Project Tango

#313

Post by User8712 »

chacham15 wrote: post #255

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".

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.

Re: Project Tango

#314

Post by TophWells »

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.

Re: Project Tango

#315

Post by TeMPOraL »

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

Re: Project Tango

#316

Post by coldtea »

dualogy wrote: post #310
f_salmon wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be nice for certain niche users. But the trend I see is companies telling us to regularly buy stuff we really don't need (and obviously throw away our "old" solutions). The world has way more pressing issues than yet-another-gadget. And the planet's resources are not unlimited.

I'm sorry that I'm not able to solve world hunger and world peace. Not sure why that means I cannot take it upon myself to hypothetically build a mobile computer-vision-powered app? Please enlighten.

It doesn't mean it. It just means that if enough people think the same way, the world is doomed.

Or, if not doomed, it's not getting any better in areas that matter.

(People laugh at words like "doomed", assuming everything will be as it was when they were growing up. For some lucky ones that's true. For others the worse happens, like a financial collapse or a world war, and then they "knew it all along it was going to happen").

Re: Project Tango

#317

Post by cmollis »

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.

Re: Project Tango

#318

Post by uglycoyote »

flyt wrote: post #130

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.

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

Re: Project Tango

#319

Post by dualogy »

coldtea wrote: post #316
dualogy wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry that I'm not able to solve world hunger and world peace. Not sure why that means I cannot take it upon myself to hypothetically build a mobile computer-vision-powered app? Please enlighten.

It doesn't mean it. It just means that if enough people think the same way, the world is doomed. Or, if not doomed, it's not getting any better in areas that matter. (People laugh at words like "doomed", assuming everything will be as it was when they were growing up. For some lucky ones that's true. For others the worse happens, like a financial collapse or a world war, and then they "knew it all along it was going…

> It just means that if enough people think the same way, the world is doomed.

True in the sense that if "enough people" believe the Internet's favourite scare-story of imminent-financial-collapse (growing in popularity ever since Y2K) then it will indeed by necessity finally happen ;)

Re: Project Tango

#320

Post by malvim »

gilgoomesh wrote: post #193
evanlivingston wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I'm a neo-luddite.

I don't think you're a luddite. With any technology like this, it's important to ask: what applications does this really enable and will those applications simply be a waste of time. This is an unveiling of a technology but the "applications" they show in this video are probably a waste of time to most users. Google have not shown a killer app that uses this tech. Maybe they're working on something (they hint that th…

Google has acknowledged that their vision of where this is going is, at best, partial: "While we may believe we know where this technology will take us, history suggests we that should be humble in our predictions. We are excited to see the effort take shape with each step forward."

I liked this part.

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