Suppose your smartphone is clever enough to grasp your physical
surroundings - the room's size, the location of doors and windows and
the presence of other people. What could it do with that info?
We're
about to get our first look. On Thursday, Lenovo will give consumers
their first chance to buy a phone featuring Google's 3-year-old Project
Tango, an attempt to imbue machines with a better understanding about
what's around them.
Location tracking through GPS and cell towers
tells apps where you are, but not much more. Tango uses software and
sensors to track motions and size up the contours of rooms, empowering
Lenovo's new phone to map building interiors. That's a crucial building
block of a promising new frontier in "augmented reality," or the digital
projection of lifelike images and data into a real-life environment.
If
Tango fulfills its promise, furniture shoppers will be able to download
digital models of couches, chairs and coffee tables to see how they
would look in their actual living rooms. Kids studying the Mesozoic Era
would be able to place a virtual Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor in their
home or classroom - and even take selfies with one. The technology would
even know when to display information about an artist or a scene
depicted in a painting as you stroll through a museum.
Tango will
be able to create internal maps of homes and offices on the fly. Google
won't need to build a mapping database ahead of time, as it does with
existing services like Google Maps and Street View. Nonetheless, Tango
could raise fresh concerns about privacy if controls aren't stringent
enough to prevent the on-the-fly maps from being shared with
unauthorized apps or heisted by hackers.
Lenovo announced its
plans for the Tango phone in January, but Thursday will mark the first
time that the company is showing the device publicly. At the Lenovo Tech
World conference in San Francisco, the Chinese company is expected to
announce the phone's price and release date.
The efforts come as
phone sales are slowing. People have been holding off on upgrades,
partly because they haven't gotten excited about the types of
technological advances hitting the market during the past few years.
Phones offering intriguing new technology could help spur more sales.
But
Tango's room-mapping technology is probably still too abstract to gain
mass appeal right away, says Ramon Llamas, an analyst at the IDC
research group.
"For most folks, this is still a couple steps
ahead of what they can wrap their brains around, so I think there's
going to be a long gestation period," Llamas says.
Other
smartphones promising quantum leaps have flopped. Remember Amazon's Fire
phone released with great fanfare two years ago? That souped-up phone
featured four front-facing cameras and a gyroscope so some images could
be seen in three dimensions. The device also offered a tool called
Firefly that could be used to identify objects and sounds. But the Fire
fizzled, and Amazon no longer even sells the phone.
The key to the
Tango phone's success is likely to hinge on the breadth of compelling
apps that people find useful in their everyday lives. If history is any
guide, the early apps may be more demonstrative than practical.
Google
already has released experimental Tango devices designed for computer
programmers, spurring them to build about 100 apps that will work with
Lenovo's new phone. At a conference for developers last month, Google
demonstrated an app for picturing furniture in actual living rooms and
for taking selfies with digital dinosaurs.
Both large and small
tech companies are betting that augmented realty, or AR, will take off
sooner than later. Microsoft has been selling a $3,000 (roughly Rs. 1.9 lakhs) prototype of its
HoloLens AR headset. Others, such as Facebook's Oculus and Samsung, are
out with virtual-reality devices. Google has one coming as well through
its Daydream project. While AR tries to blend the artificial with your
actual surroundings, virtual reality immerses its users in a setting
that's entirely fabricated.
With both, the devices out so far
invariably require users to wear a headset or glasses. In many cases,
they also must be tethered to more powerful personal computers,
restricting the ability to move around.
None of that is necessary
with Lenovo's Tango phone. Instead, you get an augmented look at your
surroundings through the phone's screen.
"This has a chance to
become pervasive because it's integrated into a device that you already
have with you all the time," says Jeff Meredith, a Lenovo vice president
who oversaw development of the Tango device. "You aren't going to have
to walk around a mall wearing a headset."
Google plans to bring
Tango to other phones, but is focusing on the Lenovo partnership this
year, according to Johnny Lee, a Google executive who oversaw the team
that developed the technology.
Tango drew upon previous research
in robotics and the U.S. space program. Lee believes three-dimensional
imagery and data - whether through the new Tango phone or another
technology - will help reshape the way people interact with e-commerce,
education and gaming.
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