Gadgetory

hey this is Tom with the verge we're in Barcelona today at mobile Congress and lenovo has invited us to a museum now normally I would walk in the museum and not have an idea where I was going the whole idea of the event today is to show us Google's Project tango in action so we've seen this before it's a tablet with crazy Freedy sensing cameras on the back but really today it's not about gaming or any of the other augmented reality purposes you could use it for it's for indoor navigation obviously Google's the king of mapping outdoors but they're really trying to be the king of mapping indoors too so we went in there's a tablet it's as usual project tango development kit so we don't up seeing it on a phone yet that's the big promise but the tablet essentially allows you to navigate around this museum the interface is very much like Google Maps you get a live view which is an augmented reality view so you get blue lines and dots that you can see and basically travel around the museum from floor to floor or from painting to painting and essentially what it does is it's guiding you around the museum allowing you to find your way without them to ask someone without leave the traditional ways and this was just a museum today you can imagine this would be great in a mall any retail stores any sort of setting like that so you can tap on the tablet once you get to say the painting you're trying to find you can tap on on the painting they'll have little markers to give you information about the things so and it's actually good to see it in action today and so we spoke with Google and Lenovo after the quick demonstration they basically told us that the idea is obviously to get this into a smartphone and so at the moment the promise is a six inch all around that sort of figure as smartphones there's going to be a pretty large device and but trying to keep it real simple on the hardware and keeping the camera in line with what you would expect from a normal camera on a phone and then the other promise is that to map these rooms and to get all this indoor data and they're trying to hope that this is like a crowdsource thing or something that moles Warne appears to do themselves is like a selling point to attract customers try and get them in and make it a lot easier to navigate around in reality we'll see if people want to walk around with their cameras on and capturing this data for Google and I think their idea is that you'll get something back from it if you participate in this crowdsourcing the idea and the dream of navigating indoors is very much alive we just saw a really small taste of it today