tango – Page 3 – Augmented & Virtual Reality Confabulation

November 1, 2016

Google Tango Team Reports Directly To VR Leader Clay Bavor

Google is one of the augmented and virtual reality industry’s major players. Between its many investments, acquisitions, products and corporate maneuverings, the search giant has become a force to be reckoned with in the early days of this highly innovative space. Two of the major prongs on Google’s AR/VR spear are its Daydream and Tango teams. These are two engineering groups creating their own unique immersive projects. According to a company executive, however, these two prongs may now have been fused into one razor sharp point.

Johnny Lee is the director of engineering for the Tango team. At a press event at Google’s San Francisco offices, Lee confirmed to UploadVR that Tango has joined Daydream under the Google VR umbrella.

“From an organizational standpoint, Tango and Daydream work together,” Lee said. “I report directly to Clay Bavor, who reports directly to Sundar Pinchai.”

Clay Bavor – Google’s VP of VR

Pinchai is, of course, the CEO of Google that was appointed during the 2015 Alphabet restructuring process and Bavor is the vice president of virtual reality for the company. The chain of command outlined by Lee suggests Tango has now officially been brought on-board as a member of the broader Google VR mission, rather than being left as a standalone, experimental team.

The inner-working of a company with the size and scope of Google are always tricky and the silicon valley juggernaut sometimes won’t even disclose how many people are working on a given team, let alone what that team is working on. However, Tango’s transition from sharing a company to sharing a VP with the Daydream team is a clue at least as to what the company may be considering for the technology’s future.

Tango requires the use of a smartphone’s outward-facing camera, along with an additional depth sensor. This means it won’t be of much use to the upcoming Daydream View VR headset, which blocks the rear of the smartphones used to power it via its docking mechanism. However, given that Daydream and Tango are being worked on under a single leader, it would be reasonable to anticipate a combination of technologies in the next generation of Google VR.

When asked to comment on this possibility, Lee responded by saying “that would be a very good idea.”

November 1, 2016

Google’s Tango Team Has ‘Solved’ Inside-Out Positional Tracking For Wireless VR

Google’s Tango Team Has ‘Solved’ Inside-Out Position Tracking For Wireless VR

Last week, at a Google press event UploadVR had the chance to speak with Google Tango’s director of engineering, Johnny Lee. Tango is a software/hardware solution that allows smartphones and other mobile devices to understand their location in 3D space and translate that information into powerful applications and programs. According to Lee, this technology is also the key to solving one of the biggest problems in the burgeoning virtual reality industry: inside-out positional tracking for wireless VR headsets.

“We’ve solved it here,” Lee said, gesturing at a Tango-powered, Lenovo Phab 2 Pro smartphone. “As you can see [inside-out positional tracking] clearly works on this phone…We’ve even had people strap a tablet sized device with Tango built in into a custom VR headset and the positional tracking worked just as well as it does here…The only thing really holding us back right now are the thermals. Right now, phones just get way too hot if we ask them to run positional tracking and split-screen stereoscopic image at 90 fps…As Daydream matures and Tango continues to improve, the sophistication around tracking will also evolve over the next 2-3 years.“

Lee declined to comment when asked when exactly people can expect to see a commercially released VR headset with this kind of capability.

Tango’s director of product, Nikhil Chandhok, concurred with Lee’s assertions that, with Tango, inside-out positional tracking for VR is possible, but there are still hurdles to cross:

“We have it working. We can do inside-out tracking with six degrees of movement and we can do it today. There are just some concerns we need to address first. For example: how do you keep people safe when they are walking around freely with a headset on?…The VR use cases are just much more demanding than what we’re doing right now, however, there will be more interesting use cases in the future.”

Today’s high-end VR systems — the Oculus Rift, Playstation VR, and HTC Vive — all use what’s called “outside-in” positional tracking. This means that they all require some sort of camera, laser or sensor that live outside of the headset itself in order to understand their positions in space. Without these outside components, one could not lean into objects in an experience, and would be limited to the left, right, up, down, tracking currently seen in mobile VR headsets such as Google Cardboard or the Samsung Gear VR.

Inside-out positional tracking would allow virtual reality to become truly wireless and enable a whole host of incredibly powerful use cases. It is the latest “holy grail” for the VR scene, with most of the major companies scrambling to be first to market with the world’s first wireless, position-tracked HMD. At this year’s Oculus Connect conference, the Facebook-owned company showed off a prototype code-named “Santa Cruz” that utilized a form of inside-out tracking separate from Tango, and Microsoft is using its HoloLens tracking to bring the tech to wired VR headsets. Qualcomm and Intel are just a few of the companies trying to solve this problem as well.

The race is on for positional tracking supremacy.

November 1, 2016

Lenovo Phab 2 Pro: The First AR Smartphone Powered By Google Tango Arrives

Welcome to the beginning of a new age. Today, the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro smartphone is officially being released. The Phab 2 Pro has several things that make it unique. It boasts a colossal 6.4 inch touch screen display (to put that in perspective, the iPhone 6 plus’ screen is 5.5 inches), a herculean 4050 maH battery that can hold a charge for up to two days, and it is the first ever smartphone to come equipped with Google’s revolutionary Tango augmented reality technology.

Tango is the brainchild of a dedicated team of engineers led by Google’s Johnny Lee. It is a combined hardware/software system that uses the phone’s camera, a depth sensor and a fistful of brilliant algorithms to create a device that is capable of understanding where it is positioned in 3D space.

According to Lee:

“In some ways you can think of [Tango] like GPS…Once we had the abilities of those systems, a whole ecosystem was birthed. Being able to know how we move in space around us is fundamentally important. When our devices are given that same sense of spacial reasoning, a whole new suite of experiences are possible”

Ever since the advent of GPS technologies, your phone has been able to pinpoint its location to a specific region. This is helpful for macro navigation and basic wayfinding, but Tango takes things a step further. With this system on board, the Phab 2 Pro is able to understand not only its position on Earth, but its position in your living room.

This is one of those broad-strokes computing revolutions that sounds simple enough on the surface but actually opens the door to an enormous number of powerful new applications and programs. One of the apps that shows off this tech’s potential the best is one of its simplest: Google Measure.

Because Tango is able to understand and “see” its immediate surroundings, it is capable of accomplishing tasks that no other smartphone could. As the above video demonstrates, with Measure you can use Tango to measure a bookcase, plot out a remodel, or tackle a number of other home improvement projects. This may seem trite but the importance of the jump in this phone’s “brain power” is significant.

Tango-enabled devices can also show you new things as well. A huge use case for the Phab 2 is augmented reality. Because it can process its environment, it can overlay digital data directly on top of the physical world to create a number of one of a kind experiences.

A Google blog post published today revealed what several of those experiences are:

Measure anything in your home from your door frame to your desk with
Visualize how furniture and appliances will look in your home with
Play dominoes anywhere without having to pack up the tiles later, with
Paint and draw on all the surfaces of your home with
Take epic selfies with your favorite dinosaurs using
Play with virtual pets with
Explore the solar system with
Build new digital worlds with
Race on your own personal race tracks with
Customize your videos with exciting 3D filters with

There was the occasional hiccup, however. As you can see in the video below, Tango’s ability to read a room is not 100 percent perfect yet. It sometimes failed to calculate angle and depth correctly during our demo, occasionally reading objects in the foreground — such as a leg — as being flush with the ground.

These blips were few and far between however, and most of the time Tango was able to understand its surroundings with high accuracy, to the point of being able to place a digital domino up on a table and having it fall onto the ground below.

The Phab 2 Pro is only the beginning for Google and its Tango platform. According to Lee there will be “many more” Tango-enabled handsets coming to market soon from a “number of manufacturers, providers and partners.” Google declined to comment on exactly which companies it’s partnering with and what sort of devices they may be working on.

The Phab Pro 2 costs $499 USD (unlocked) and is available for purchase now.