Smartphones could soon sense their surroundings
SAN FRANCISCO - Suppose your smartphone is clever enough to sense 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 information?
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 tyrannosaur 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 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.
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 will help reshape the way people interact with e-commerce, education and gaming.
NEW YORK - The U.S. government is taking a key step in relinquishing control of the internet’s addressing system, fulfilling a promise made in the 1990s.
The Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration said Thursday that it endorses a March proposal to turn full control over to a private international organization. All that remains is completing some contracts and operational testing. That’s expected to be done in the coming months.
The organization deals with matters including the assignment of internet suffixes such as “.com” and “.org” and the operation of the internet’s “root servers,” the master directories for telling web browsers where to find websites. Without them, users would