A look inside Google's 3-D mapping Tango phone and tablet

Google's Tango phone and tablet can sense the world around them. This new hardware sparks the imagination, and hits some real-world barriers.

|
Courtesy of Omar-Pierre Soubra
Trimble’s Omar-Pierre Soubra poses for one of Google's new Tango phones.

As the first app developer outside of Google Labs to get his hands on both the new Tango phone and tablet, Trimble director Omar-Pierre Soubra is the one to talk to if you want to fill your dance card with Tango’s best moves. Google's Project Tango initiative is pushing the bounds of virtual experiences and realistic mapping on mobile devices. 

In February, Google introduced the Tango phone, which can sense and map out objects around it, creating a 3-D model of the physical world. The subsequent Tango tablet comes full of sensors, a motion-tracking camera, and 128 gigabytes of storage.

“The first thing I did when I got the Tango phone back in March was take and post a 3-D selfie,” Mr. Soubra says in a phone interview from his home in Westminster, Colo. “I was showing off. It’s very exciting technology.”

Selfies aside, as one of the elite among the pioneer developers outside Google Labs, Soubra is also among the first to run headlong into the products’ current barriers.

In his time with the cutting-edge devices, Soubra has encountered issues with very short battery life; the phone becoming hot to the touch when multitasking; and an inability to detect certain surfaces, such as glass and outdoor objects.

Having graduated to the Tango tablet well before its unveiling this week, Soubra found that Google has solved some of these issues. The Tango tablet has “a much longer battery life, takes longer to exhibit heating issues, and is more of an app-friendly environment in which to both shoot and process 3-D mapping, scanning, and environment creation,” Soubra says.

“Unfortunately, the devices still really don’t work very well outdoors,” he explains. “It has to do with the depth-perception infrared scanner at this point. [Project Tango developers inside Google] are well on the way to addressing that. However, for now, it’s best to use the devices indoors.”

Soubra is an exception when it comes to having one of these devices in hand. The new tablet will not be made available to most software developers until late June.

As far as being able to operate these two new Tango devices, no fancy footwork is involved.

“It is exactly the same thing as using an Android phone,” Soubra says. “Your system is pretty much exactly the same. There is no learning curve on that aspect.”

One developer who is still waiting to get his hands on a Tango device is Kevin Gallup, a sculptor and 3-D scanning inventor in Pensacola, Fla.

Mr. Gallup holds a patent, issued in 2007, for a device used to 3-D scan surfaces.

Gallup says he ran into some of the same issues in 2007 that Tango has encountered today, such as the ability to scan clear or opaque surfaces, like glass.

However Gallup isn’t looking at Tango as a form of competition, but rather as collaboration for the sake of the art world. He supports a new green initiative by museums around the world that are trying to reduce the amount of packing materials wasted in the transport of art collections.

Gallup has spent the last five years doing research for the Yale University Gallery to create an easy and affordable 3-D scanning and mapping system that would allow the reverse image of art objects to be cut into foam for reusable packing cases.

The holdup in the art world, according to Gallup, has been the lack of readily available 3-D scanning and mapping devices that could be used by museum employees with little or no 3-D modeling experience.

“Last week I was asked by [the Preparation Art Handling Collection Care Information Network] to do a series of presentations all along the East Coast on the current status and availability of 3-D scanning for art curators,” Gallup says. “Hopefully, I will get my hands on a Tango phone or tablet to see how it might be developed for use by museums worldwide.”

“Even though this kind of renders my own patent useless," Gallup adds, "it’s a good thing to have these Tango units available for institutions, like Yale, because security regulations prevent non-museum personnel from performing the scans.”

The 7-inch tablet will cost $1,024, and will feature a software kit that will give developers tools to build applications with the technology.

According to Gallup, “That would be a tiny price to pay if it means a priceless work of art is not only safely transported but because of that safety, can become mobile enough that people around the world can have that priceless art experience brought to their city.”

“I’d call that ‘innovation,’ ” he says. “That was my vision and I would just be happy to help Google solve these last few issues that can make it happen for art.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to A look inside Google's 3-D mapping Tango phone and tablet
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2014/0606/A-look-inside-Google-s-3-D-mapping-Tango-phone-and-tablet
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe