Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The weird virtual reality of Project Tango”.
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.
.