Google’s 3D Phone Going with NASA’s Robots

Google’s 3D-phone, Project Tango, will be shipped into space to control NASA’s space equipment to provide its sensing capabilities.

It has been only two years since 3D-phones started to emerge in the media. Now we learn that the technology is not only fully functional, but also getting mounted on NASA’s space equipment.

This reminds me when my elementary teacher told us that she has never imagined of moving stairs, a.k.a. escalators, when she was a child. When I was a baby, I played with the TV remote control as if I was calling someone. In my eyes, that plastic brick seemed to have ‘wireless’ going on and has cool buttons on it just like our home phone, so why not?

My futuristic imagination was beaten by the reality within two decades just like my teacher’s. As of now, not only is owning a mobile phone a common thing for more than 60% of the world population, but phones are just getting smarter and more affordable everyday.

Google’s Project Tango team built its first android tablet prototype embedding 3D mapping sensors in 2013. The prototype has a front camera, back main camera, motion-tracking camera and a depth sensor. This is to mimic human eyes, by constructing a broad peripheral vision with a central foveal vision in more detail.

In March this year, roughly 200 smartphone prototypes were sent out to developers containing these camera components. This phone can take more than 250,000 3D measurements every second and capable of updating the position and orientation in real-time.

One should realize that sensor systems can be attached to a smartphone to be operated on the phone’s processing chip. Thus, there are many startup companies selling external sensor systems for smartphones with the app for some specific purpose. In other words, the app would only work with the external sensor hardware. But a fixed integration of sensor component such as 3D camera in smartphone introduces a huge opportunity for exploration and creativity for all app developers.

Surprisingly, the first users of Google’s 3D phones are going to be NASA’s space robots. The robots, called Spheres, are satellites about the size of a bowling ball, currently used for testing spacecraft’s meeting and docking routines.

With Project Tango phones, these robots now gain an additional ‘feel’ for space and motion just like human, and therefore will be capable of exploring and mapping out the station using the 3D camera.

And yes, this tells us that when Project Tango becomes available to us, you could capture your room in 3D simply by walking around with it, download some app and play with furniture deployment.