Gadgetory

a lot of people are already familiar with augmented reality on their smartphones in fact if you play Pokemon go you already kind of know how this works but there's a new advanced AR out there and while it only exists on one phone right now it has the potential to dramatically change the way we interact with the world through our smartphones it's called tango formerly known as project tango and it's made by Google so right now tango is only available on one smartphone this Lenovo fab 2 pro a 500-dollar 6.4 inch smartphone which also happens to be Lenovo's first smartphone in the US but this isn't about the phone this is about how Google and Lenovo have taken this advanced 3d sensing technology and crammed it into something that is still technically a device you can fit in your hands or your pocket the result is something that feels a little bit experimental a little bit half-baked but at the same time kind of mind-blowing there's a lot of hardware that goes into making tango work and a lot of that has to do with cameras in the phone normally when you think of cameras in a smartphone you think okay I snap a photo and then I forget about it but in this case three of the four cameras on the fab 2 Pro are advanced sensors they'll allow the phone to see and map and remember the world around you there's a 16 megapixel RGB camera a wide-angle fisheye camera and an infrared emitter not to mention the accelerometer a gyroscope a Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 to processor that was customized to support tango a big battery and everything else that goes into the phone so if regular AR creates a relatively flat or static layer of digital information on the world in front of you then tango creates a much more immersive environment it's fisheye camera allows the phone to understand your positioning in a room and it's IR emitter this little red blinking light on the back sends infrared beams to an object around you and then lets the phone interpret distances so when you're playing a game or let's say you're measuring the wall in a room the phone is actually seeing and measuring and remembering the information in the I'm kind of in the same way that you are here's an example you can actually run apps like home improvement app or a home decorating app on the fab 2 Pro with tango and you can play something like a lamp or a couch or a picture frame in a room and see how it would actually look in real life there are also some apps that seem pretty silly but are kind of fun like a our pets or bubbles there's a game called world that lets you plant digital flowers and water them with digital clouds and do all kinds of cool stuff and you can easily see the educational opportunities with tango - the dinosaur is among us app which was created by the American Museum of Natural History lets you put dinosaurs in your real-life environment and even lets you hang little framed illustrations on your walls but it's also worth noting the phone gets really warm after even just 20 minutes of using tango apps right now there are only around 35 tango apps in the Google Play Store which isn't many and based on my experience the ones that would have been the most useful like the Wayfarer furniture app or the Lowe's home improvement app for the ones that felt the least intuitive and the most buggy I can't tell you how many virtual swipes and taps and gestures it took to just try to place virtual furniture no room to see what it would look like which is really what the promise of these apps are so tango is a mixed bag but I will say this most people who has showed these apps to kind of have their minds blown and it's only the first tango phone so there's room for improvement I personally would not run out and buy this phone just for this but this technology if and when it makes its way into other phones has the potential to be a real game-changer plus no air headset required hi kitties and crammed it into something that's still there's a cat hair on my phone cute a that actually have the potential to be most useful sorry I like how I apologize for the door sorry about the door it's kind of a game changer I mean it really has the potential to interact to just up