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Friday, May 23, 2014

Project Tango taking over the world, or just catching up to Roomba?

The tech behind Project Tango is amazing. 3D mapped environments all on your smartphone. The folks at University of Pennsylvania took to an AR.Drone 2.0 and made Project Tango handle navigation and flight controls. Very cool. But, a self aware device that can navigate the room already exists, it's called the Roomba, and it cleans up after itself, and you.



Okay, okay, Roomba and Project Tango are not the same thing, not even close. I just wanted to point out that we have a long way to go in R&D before we get anything extremely new and useful out of Project Tango. It is extremely cool that NASA can utilize Project Tango for their in-space projects, but from what I've seen, all they've done is create the vacuum-less flying version of a Roomba. I like it, but it is not earth shattering. (See what I did there? Earth... Space... hahaha... sorry.)



Since Project Tango needs a few more eyes and brains working with it, I am very excited at the rumor of about 4000 tablet sized versions of the device going into production. They will be doled out to developers that have already pitched their plans for the unit, which is exactly the crowd-sourced R&D I want to see.

You came here to see Project Tango in action. I invite you to check out my article over on Android Authority for all the particulars. The only thing I have to say, I wish they would have spun the drone instead of just moving it smoothly off course, I'd love to know if it can recover from a new orientation as well as a new location.




So, what do you think, are we all doomed?

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