Gadgetory

it was time for a change I've been working from home for a number of years now and I needed my own space and in my searches I found a 500 square foot office at a reasonable price however as I sat in the middle of that office with nothing inside of it I realized I don't know what the heck I'm doing when it comes to furnishing this place luckily around the time I was given a tool that was going to help a traffic are what's going on everybody and this is my brand-new office or studio furnished thanks to the assist sent phone AR and Google tango before I get started a quick disclaimer the zenfone AR that you're seeing and that was used in order to get this project done is in Asian unit this phone actually has been out for a little while now in other markets and I was lucky enough to get my hands on one in order to do this office project before the Verizon announcement so we are going to get a unit that is made for Verizon made for US carriers and it's at that point after about a week or so that I'm going to give you my full review of the phone as a daily driver but before we get to that let's talk about tango in general it's actually a little bit tough to explain the camera array on the back provides a clue but there's definitely a lot more happening than just a few more optical packages motion tracking is achieved through the accelerometer and the gyroscope sensors depth perception happens thanks to a proprietary camera built alongside the phone's existing shooter and then area learning entails the recording of it all for real-time or rendered data the result is a phone that not only knows where it is in relation to all of the objects in the space but it also can make that area easily seen in a 3d rendered way and with high-end specifications included like the Snapdragon 820 160 gigabytes of RAM and plenty of storage the zenfone AR is capable of holding all of that data into one small package definitely smaller than other tango packages that came before it there are a lot of applications inside the tango area of the Google Play Store but compared to the entire Google Play Store it still only takes up a small percentage of everything that you can do however the different applications range from utilitarian to entertaining we've already seen a number of augmented reality game demos I tried to impose objects on top of real life elements but with tango additions these elements can take into account walls objects and space in order to provide a more of experience users can inject a life-sized version of a soccer player for example in order to juggle a soccer ball render a board onto a table in order to play a virtual game and my personal favorite actually have a virtual puppy that you have to raise and play with that will run around the room that you have rendered a number of new applications have appeared in the tango area of the Play Store especially since this phone was going to be announced today so when I was doing this little office project plotting out all of the furniture in this new studio space that I have I was using a limited amount of applications but I did try to make the best of it so with that in mind the first thing that I'm probably going to end up doing is popping into the constructor app now the constructor app is a developer app available for tango that allows you to plot out an entire area now I have a completely open space which means that there isn't too much texture that I have to capture here and I don't have to get below different objects in order to get them to be plotted correctly I might have to do that with the chair but overall we're just looking at an empty space so this should end up being a 3d rendering of essentially an empty room the objective was to get a bird's-eye 3d rendered view of the entire space so that I can actually see where I could place things inside of that virtual area to get the best render possible I had to mull over as much of the room as I could with more passes required one object slowly started to populate the area basically when I had furniture that was slowly getting into this place I had to walk around in multiple times to get the most well rendered scene but it was in this situation when I tried to get the most data points that I could that the tango camera actually lost its place and I had to reset before I could continue this was an issue that came up from time to time not only in the constructor app but with a couple of other applications that I used later on so after going through the constructor app I downloaded Wayfair which is a furniture catalog but unfortunately I found the wayfarer catalog to be a little bit too limiting and in a lot of ways way too specific for my needs I didn't necessarily want very specific furniture from the way for a catalog I wanted generic items that I could put into the space basically so that I knew what kind of area I would be able to create so that brought me to a our home now a our home does not really pull from a specific catalog and thus it provides generic items that I could put into the virtual space so I knew how much space I was taking up with all the different furniture I would find out what pieces of furniture would fit in the space and then figure out to get the appropriately sized real-life pieces obviously with a budget like mine ended up going to places like IKEA and that was the main place that I went to for all of my furniture and it would have been awesome to actually have an IKEA application powered by tango so IKEA if you're listening get on that the actual camera came into use at this point as I took pictures of all of the different pieces of furniture and took note of where I would be able to buy them in the warehouse and with that the real work began it took about two to three weeks but I was finally able to make the office take shape I did try to use the constructor app to get more renders but like I mentioned before it was actually hard to make a 3d space using that app to their credit however the constructor app is made only for developers and actually it is still in beta so I can't really fault it too much but the office behind me started to take shape based upon the render I made in a our home you can see the gaming area to my right here where I have a TV already and to the couch of course is right behind me so I can take breaks and then over to my left you can see the workstation that I use for filming a lot of the footage that you are seeing in more recent videos and way in the back you'll be able to see I have the editing Bay with my computer you might recognize that standing desk and of course my shelf that I still use as a set from time to time so I am able to do all of my work in this space already and I'm happy that I was able to use tango to at least know that I wasn't going to be just buying a lot of different furnitures and then realize I didn't have any space at all but it all comes back to this issue of content tango definitely feels like the future and there are going to be applications for it that make tango indispensable but those are still niche areas and even then there are those technical issues that I mentioned earlier when using the constructor app the app would actually crash from time to time and then when using the brand new BMW visualizer I was finding the i3 and the i8 in virtual space rendered in a place that it shouldn't be now I get it being inside of an office is not ideal for actually putting a car but when I went outside to try and put the car into the parking lot outside of my office it actually rendered inside of the gate which was really odd those technical issues aside what tango really needs right now is more support and a bit more imagination from developers to bring their visions to life especially from big names that would realize an augmented reality version of their existing properties is literally the future of this platform so I am actually pretty thankful that I had the Zen phone AR with me and because of project tango I was able to get into this office and start furnishing it without having to do it blindly I was able to figure out where all of my furniture would go and how much space I would have left and actually I have a lot of space that is still unoccupied so there's a lot of room for improvement and a lot of room for even more things for me to do in this space and without project tango that wouldn't have been a reality so when I get my full US unit I'll be using the zenfone AR on the daily and see how tango fits into the life of an average user stay tuned to Android 30 for that and even more about project tango the zenfone AR and even more because we are your source for all things Android