We are excited to announce a new project from ATAP, something that we have been working quietly on over the past year.

As we walk through our daily lives, we use visual cues to navigate and understand the world around us. We use our eyes to observe the size and shape of objects and rooms, and we learn their position and layout over time almost effortlessly . This awareness of space and motion is fundamental to the way we interact with our environment and each other.  We are physical beings that live in a 3D world. Yet, our mobile devices assume that physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen.

The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.

Our team has been working with universities, research labs, and industrial partners spanning nine countries around the world to harvest research from the last decade of work in robotics and computer vision, concentrating that technology into a unique mobile phone.  Now, we’re ready to put early prototypes into the hands of developers that can imagine the possibilities and help pull those ideas into reality. 

What if you never found yourself lost in a new building again?  What if directions to a new location didn’t stop at the street address? Imagine playing hide-and-seek in your house with your favorite game character. Imagine competing against a friend for control over physical space with your own miniature army.

We hope you will take this journey with us. We believe it will be one worth traveling.  To find out more, and apply for a development kit visit  http://g.co/ProjectTango.

The future is awesome. Let’s build it together.

-- Johnny Lee, and the ATAP Project Tango team

OMG Stop it. 

Time for another fun story of clever engineering!

Today is the 9th anniversary of the Huygens probe landing on Saturn's moon, Titan. Below is a pic it took from the surface. Cassini and Huygens have learned a tremendous amount over the years about Titan (Huygens didn't last long, about 90 minutes after touchdown), but this is the story of how the engineers realized they had a critical issue with the communications between Huygens and Cassini.

You see, Huygens was a small probe, so it wasn't designed to communicate directly back to Earth. Instead it sent data to Cassini to be relayed back to Earth. Well engineers were clever enough to realize that since Huygens would be accelerating towards Titan, the frequency Cassini would hear would shift (called a Doppler shift, like when a siren or train sound changes as it approaches versus when it leaves), so they designed the radios to work that way.

So while they figured that part out, Cassini was built at NASA JPL and Huygens at ESA. This meant there was not a lot of opportunity for combined testing (and even less so in mimicking these conditions). It wasn't until AFTER Cassini-Huygens had launched that they realized that there was also an issue in the way the bits were received in those conditions, so without a change, Huygens data would have been rendered useless. Because we couldn't change the firmware on the radios, engineers (and in this case, mostly navigators), came up with a solution of delivering Huygens on a different trajectory so that the motion of Huygens relative to Cassini would be relatively perpendicular (this minimizes Doppler shift).

As a result, the teams were able to get the data back from Huygens including this gorgeous pic of the surface of this foreign world. (Though it turns out a small amount of data was still lost due to a command error)

You call that a smartphone? This is a smartphone!

Firefighter developing Google Glass apps to help with response and rescue

http://engt.co/KC1LQ0