Doing the Google Tango

All of these started out as ideas that seemingly could not be implemented and within only a few years’ time matured so much that they were launched as live products or prototypes. Google has thus a rich history of pushing the boundary on what seems possible. And so it’s no surprise that the latest initiative from the company — Project Tango — seems equally ludicrous and fascinating at the same time.

Project Tango, part of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Group, aims at creating indoor 3D maps in real time through users’ smartphones. Although the project is currently in a nascent stage, once fully developed it will automatically scan its user’s environment and create 3D maps that remember space dimensions and locations of physical object within the mapped area.

Project Tango uses specialised Android-based smartphones, equipped with motion-tracking cameras and depth sensors that assess, memorise and map the user’s environment where these smartphone are being used. The program outputs a virtual 3D map that is developed to scale and features the exact locations of various physical objects present within the space.

Further, these maps are dynamically updated as users move around inside their homes or workplaces or when the location of any object is moved. For example, as you add two extra chairs to a meeting room, Tango would not just be able to update the meeting room’s map with the two new chairs, but would also remove those two chairs from their earlier location reference — all in real time.

The ultimate aim of the project is to develop a smartphone-like device that can learn and understand the size, dimension and shape of the places its users visit and thus, suggest directions to any location the users want to visit, be it outdoors or within a building. To enable this, Tango smartphones feature a human-like understanding of space, depth and motion. Using this technology, users will be able to “search” where they kept their car keys the last time they entered their home and be pointed to the exact location of the keys inside their house on a 3D map. In this sense, Tango is aiming to be the search engine for the physical world, offering a personalised experience to its users.

Project Tango leverages real-time simultaneous localisation and mapping, or Slam, technology to map the indoors. These Tango smartphones are able to record data points that so far were unavailable — such as room depth and physical object locations — and this information adds a customised context to the user’s physical environment and also how mobile technology interacts with this environment.

The Project Tango technology lends itself to various avenues and Google is currently working with app developers to assess the most compelling use cases for early adopters. One such example is while shopping in supermarkets, where the users can ask their Tango smartphones where the items in their shopping list are located, and can get pointed to the exact aisle and shelf where the items are displayed. Other important uses include room and building planning through 3D maps, enhancing the physical environment features within an augmented reality game and other similar uses.

In the future, this technology, especially its depth-tracking feature, can also help the visually-impaired while walking indoors with ease and precision, as Tango smartphones can visualise the walking path ahead and alerts the users about upcoming obstacles in their paths through customised warnings. Although the technology is still a few years away from being commercially available, when it does come to fore, some industry verticals across the globe, as well as within the Middle East region, will benefit greatly from such applications. Dubai in particular, is already making a lot of efforts to transform itself into a “Smart City”. In the near future, as these technologies are launched and implemented in the city, it would help make the city even “smarter” as well as further enhance the reputation of its world-class technological infrastructure.

As the city begins to develop the infrastructure to welcome a multitude of tourists in the wake of Expo 2020, it can leverage these new technologies in industries such as retail and hospitality.

Using the Tango applications, hotels can add another layer to their disable friendliness — especially focused on easing the movements of the visually-impaired within the hotel premises. Similarly, big retailers can offer customised “beat the queue” routes inside their outlets, mapped to the users individual shopping lists and also recommend “on the way” items for cross- and up-selling based on the user’s interests and past buying history.

The writer is a UAE-based strategy consultant specialising in the telecoms industry.