Gadgetory

okay oh my god oh my god when you thought as well uh we're just calling it multiplayer VR you're not calling in limbo so project tango if you don't remember is this crazy Google project where they stick sensors and cameras on a tablet and it's able to map space in real time and know where it is inside that space we first saw it about a year ago at the last i/o and since then Johnny Lee and his team have been up to some pretty wild stuff so we have a pre-existing floor map of this room where we know are all the conference rooms are and what we can do is say hey we've just entered our building and that lobby and we want to get to the ping-pong room and so just follow the earth indoor navigation is actually really challenging problems still GPS doesn't work people try to do Bluetooth beacons Wi-Fi mapping only goes so far magnetic mapping only goes so far and there's an are number of use cases that would be enabled if you just had perfect indoor positioning to some degree I think there's a bit of anthropomorphism and that this is what people do right you could take you to a brand new building and you could start to learn your way around and I think once we can give our devices that same ability will that will become more parity to human perception lo and behold we're at the market kitchen we're very interested in building that core tech and partnering with companies such as IO for one one which is a company that does planogram data for companies like Walgreens right and they can do navigation directly to a product in the store if they knew where the customer was and we could essentially build the core tech for enabling those type of experiences without having to load up the the Walgreens is like a million sensors to tell that's right here at the phone it's just so this is just our IO prep room or just using it to practice okay so let me show you just a couple of apps where project tango does is try to revisit what these devices could do if you add additional hardware and software to them basically start exploring this idea well what is a 3d mouse look like if you were to take that device and be able to use the whole world as your interface right so just like a turn left and right we can walk around and I can just sort of move around the room and it continues to track its position and then the bottom line you can see it's also tracking Z so it's full 3d tracking so it's a new class of apps that very much starts a drift in the direction of the ER and AR but it's in a form factor that's currently in Evans this is kind of an homage to the games that you can you know virtual building and build up the walls and make a door frame like that yeah so you can walk around it and if you actually squat down you can go inside the house so we could have built a slightly bigger house that's already done that one is just that kind of quick and dirty but you could imagine like you can put castles on one part of your living room and go to your bedroom and build another part of your virtual world so let me let's walk over here because what we're going to do is we're going to put a car in the room okay it's actually challenging with tango one of the things that we do have trouble with is sometimes estimating the absolute size of things because it doesn't know about what a normal car looks like what a normal door looks right we're just making pure numerical observations about the scene right size is arbitrary it so just it just saw the room was like well a car will fit in there and it put a car in it'll try to put the car in the room regardless of how big it is so this is just using pure open-loop tracking and then you can change the color of the seats and the dash trim if you look at the modern mobile phone today it's it's for the most part stabilized like the feature set that's in it basically there's incremental changes now in that particular form factor when project tango does is try to revisit what these devices could do if you add additional hardware and software to them and where we are and where what is around us has a pretty fundamental impact over how we live our daily lives we roughly understand how big this room is and our own physical relationship with each other and if these devices understood how to do that you could then make apps that could do things like it could measure the size of your couch and measure the size of your room you can play games that actually use the shape of your house as part of the game level I've just put that box in front of us and it's using the depth sensor to actually capture the shape of the box right and I can just tap the screen to throw balls and try to play basketball and I just move the tablet around it starts to build a 3d mesh of the whole room and we can actually bounce balls off of his head okay one of the interesting things about this is that you start thinking about games that you design procedurally because you don't know actually the users living room size yeah so you have to figure out a game mechanic that actually can dynamically adjust to any room size or furniture shape we started stacking pillows and like dripping out blankets because you can actually start to build forts that actually work in the game room oh so okay yeah so it's sort of this belief that you know just like GPS everyone was fine before GPS came out right nowadays you wouldn't consider buying a phone without GPS and we hope to see tango kind of reach the same level of adoption which is we're fine today but once you have the tech you have it enable so many new things it just becomes ubiquitous right where are you just tricking it down and it's a matter of shrinking it down or are you imagining there's other sensors that need to be invented the the core our sensor suite may evolve in their form one day they might combine as the technology involves but that basic sensor suite is everything you would need to do ubiquitous six degree freedom tracking we are continuing to invest in shrinking the technology and making it actually primarily power efficient until you can ultimately get into something like this and so these are all steps toward a future that those tango classes not quite yet maybe maybe one day so a standard Android phone uses the gyro and accelerometer to do rotation so you can pivot your head but this one allows you to actually walk through the space Oh so I oh yeah so the bubbles are like where their school okay so you can walk into the bubbles right Wow Wow they're just right there and they stay where they're supposed to be so what's going on is that his his tablet is acting as a hotspot host okay and all we do is we connect to that hotspot and we get connected to his VR space uh we can listen I sort of say hi to each other hello hello oh my god how are you I'm terrified oh and so are you if we get close enough ah so remember you can actually run around the world and yeah it's definitely thank you so let me just ask the question that is most important right now for VR which is we've seen lots of little bite-sized experiences lots a little like oh this is fun to try for ten minutes and it's like okay now I'm done and now finally stuff is starting to come out next year in real way for consumers do you believe that we're going to see stuff that isn't just a fun little game to play for five minutes hi are anytime soon like if everything feels like it's like still like not much past demo yeah I think what the challenge is that right now everyone's just doing dev kits and low volume platforms but as the volume start to grow the economic start to make more sense for real production houses to focus on it even like in the early days of movies you'll have like simple test clips but then once people feel like there's actually a viable platform to target you'll see higher production things is my guess which I think will be fun like super duper fun