As we walk through our daily lives, we use visual cues to navigate and understand the world around us. We observe the size and shape of objects and rooms, and we learn their position and layout almost effortlessly over time. This awareness of space and motion is fundamental to the way we interact with our environment and each other. We are physical beings that live in a 3D world. Yet, our mobile devices assume that physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen.
The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.
A privacy nightmare, obviously, but the technology is impressive, still.
but I don’t get it… is it hardware? software? both?
Definitely both, but primarily hardware.
It’s a compact sensing device with several on-board sensors, with a touch-screen for control and viewing, which fortunately happens to be in the form factor of a phone, which is nice in itself.
Privacy doesn’t become an issue until such a device becomes a widespread phone running all kinds of location-based apps that actually people can buy. Till then, a lot of people would really like to get one of these (our lab included), working in research fields that can make good use of compact portable sensors that can provide such information that this device can (and having a usable API is a huge plus).
The privacy issue Thom refered to is that Google Now, Apple Siri, XBox One Kinect camera and Google Glass all offload (at least part) of the processing ‘to the cloud’.
So it probably applies to this as well.
Because that smartphone (or gaming console) that you have isn’t really all that smart. It doesn’t have enough storage capability, processing power and especially energy storage (battery).
Edited 2014-02-21 14:42 UTC
My best guess of this PR
is that they are going to leverage
the front cameras to advance
the studies of human vision.
Actually, more likely this is for computers, like the ones in autononymous cars and robots.
I am sorry but that’s a bit of a paranoid reaction to a beta project. Technology progresses and although I welcome safeguards, at this stage I don’t see what you can be worry about.