Gadgetory

this is Dan Seaver with the verge and we are here in Barcelona Spain checking out the project tango developer device is a built by a company named Ovidius and a partnership with Google to develop this thing and really what's cool about this is it is taking the motion tracking and computer vision technologies that we've seen for a few years maybe in things like the Mars rover project to use mapping surfaces and shrunk it down into a device that you can hold in your hand and be powered by a mobile battery as far as technology goes for it's really the the key here are the cameras and imaging sensors it's got a standard four megapixel camera here which captures full-color images and then it's paired with an IR sensor and receiver here to capture the depth and measurements of spaces and rooms and other things and then you've got a tracking camera here which is a low resolution tracking camera for tracking objects Google is actually releasing this for developers to be able to take these technologies and build applications on to take the data that's being pulled in from these cameras and sensors and then build applications some of the things that you can do are pretty cool you can actually in real time map the depth of a room this is a pretty basic demo that shows further objects are in blue where closer objects aren't red and you can see that kind of changes as I move the camera around from there you can extrapolate things like distances and other things so if you're mapping the size of a room and creating a 3d model you can get accurate sizes other things I can do is a depth sensor as well so this you can see this is a blasting and IR pulse across the room to measure the depth of the room in in a matter of seconds and it's able to feed that information back to the camera and back to the phone and then can be used in an application it almost looks like a sci-fi type of scanning going on one of the the other things that you can do is capture real time 3d modeling over it's able to capture a low-resolution picture and then it uses the motion sensors and the vision sensors to build a 3d model as you pan around the room you can see things that are further away and closer in front of us here we've got a table and you can see it's building that table just as I pan around with the camera Google is looking to get this into developers hands in the very near future within the next month or so and then it's really up to developers to come up with cool applications that take advantage of all of this technology and all of this data that's on tap we've seen some companies already have announced and come up with apps that are able to map out a space and build a 3d model for room planning and other features but it's a it should be interesting to see how developers are able to take advantage of all of this technology and make it useful to us so there you go that's a look at the Google tango device with some really cool computer vision technology