Your Phone May Soon Sense Everything Around You
YOUR PHONE MAY SOON SENSE EVERYTHING AROUND YOU
BY MICHAEL LIEDTKE AP TECHNOLOGY WRITER Jun 9, 12:03 AM
EDT
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- 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 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.
© 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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