Gadgetory

hi I'm addy Robertson with a verge and I'm here at Google i/o Google's big annual development conference and I'm checking out project tango so project tango is a sort of science fictional augmented reality project that Google has been working on for a while but it's now getting a little bit closer to becoming a real thing because Google is going to put it in the very first consumer product it's a phone it's from Lenovo and it's coming out this summer so here at i/o they've got a handful of experiments that can show you exactly what tango can do so we're going to go check them out so we got to try six project tango experiments the first one is low vision Louis really likes to do augmented reality systems to show what people's houses might look like with Lowe's furniture or appliances you can live around it can sense where a blank space would be that you could put say a fridge you can place that fridge there and then you can sort of move it around rotate it see what it would look like and then obviously buy it Wayfarer view is a little bit like Lowe's and that it wants you to buy furniture but it wants you to be able to see what it looks like beforehand so again you find some blank floor you put a chair down or a stool or a table and then you can walk around is it's not perfect with its mapping but it's good enough to give it a general idea of what the room would look like with this furniture and obviously there you can click through you can add it to your cart and buy it and then you've got constructor so you can bring your camera here you scan a room and then it will give you a sort of navigable 3d version of that room and then it will smooth it out so it actually looks pretty good you can also play some games with tango one of these is world from a studio called phenomena and what's notable about it is that one of the developers is the creator of Katamari Damacy so it brings that same sense of weird lindsey but you're placing things around the room but you're not really playing a traditional game you're just putting down a bunch of objects and seeing how they interact with each other it's much more like a sandbox which is great because if you're trying to actually build a gay and in your room like make characters jump along your tables that's often really boring it's sort of difficult to structure but if all you're doing is basically playing with Legos or toys that's pretty cool the last thing I checked out is called dinos among us and that is exactly what it is it's a way that you can place pretty realistic looking dinosaurs and then you walk around them you can look at animations and you can scale them so obviously tangos not the kind of augmented reality we mean when we talk about whole lens or something that realistically looks like a hologram and it's still kind of rough how things are going to jump around a little bit it's not like you will actually mistake them for real things in the environment but for that it's pretty cool they can come up with a lot of creative applications for it and it's actually great in a situation where what you're trying to do is use it as a tool instead of an entertainment product so again we're going to be seeing it in the wild this summer so we'll get to see if other people think the same thing if you liked this you can check us out at youtube.com slash The Verge or we've got a whole lot more