Suppose your smartphone is clever enough to grasp your physical surroundings — the room’s size, the location of doors and windows, and the presence of other people. What could it do with that information?
People can now have their first look. Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) yesterday gave consumers their first chance to buy a phone featuring Google’s three-year-old Project Tango, an attempt to imbue machines with a better understanding about what is around them.
Location tracking through GPS and cell towers tells apps where you are, but not much more. Tango uses software and sensors to track motions and size up the contours of rooms, empowering Lenovo’s new smartphone to map building interiors. That is a crucial building block of a promising new frontier in “augmented reality,” or the digital projection of lifelike images and data into a real-life environment.
If Tango fulfills its promise, furniture shoppers are to be able to download digital models of couches, chairs and coffee tables to see how they would look in their actual living rooms. Kids studying the Mesozoic Era would be able to place a virtual Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor in their home or classroom — and even take selfies with one. The technology would even know when to display information about an artist or a scene depicted in a painting as you stroll through a museum.
Tango is to be able to create internal maps of homes and offices on the fly. Google would not need to build a mapping database ahead of time, as it does with existing services like Google Maps and Street View. Nonetheless, Tango could raise fresh concerns about privacy if controls are not stringent enough to prevent the on-the-fly maps from being shared with unauthorized apps or heisted by hackers.
At the Lenovo Tech World conference in San Francisco, the Chinese company was expected to announce the new smartphone’s price and release date.
The efforts come as phone sales are slowing. People have been holding off on upgrades, partly because they have not gotten excited about the types of technological advances hitting the market over the past few years. Smartphones offering intriguing new technology could help spur more sales.
However, Tango’s room-mapping technology is probably still too abstract to gain mass appeal right away, said Ramon Llamas, an analyst at research firm International Data Corp.
“For most folks, this is still a couple steps ahead of what they can wrap their brains around, so I think there is going to be a long gestation period,” Llamas said.
The key to the Tango smartphone’s success is likely to hinge on the breadth of compelling apps that people find useful in their everyday lives. Google has already released experimental Tango devices designed for computer programmers, spurring them to build about 100 apps that would work with Lenovo’s new smartphone. At a conference for developers last month, Google demonstrated an app for picturing furniture in actual living rooms and for taking selfies with digital dinosaurs.
Google plans to bring Tango to other smartphones, but is focusing on the Lenovo partnership this year, said Johnny Lee, a Google executive who oversaw the team that developed the technology.
Tango drew upon previous research in robotics and the US space program. Lee believes three-dimensional imagery and data — whether through the new Tango smartphone or another technology — would help reshape the way people interact with e-commerce, education and gaming. |
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