$500 Lenovo Phab2 Pro Is the First Google Tango Phone | Hacker News Reader

$500 Lenovo Phab2 Pro Is the First Google Tango Phone

engadget.com

64 pointsstanzheng29 comments

Oy. This is how not to launch new tech - they're announcing hardware without any use cases to explain to consumers why it's valuable. This is a symptom of the lack of coordination between electronics manufacturers and the Android team, which unfortunately doesn't seem to be righting itself after all this time.

I love 3d mapping tech, and am eagerly awaiting it in devices. This tech could have been integrated into Google Maps, one of the most popular apps on mobile devices, but instead is launched with this weird message of hope that maybe one day it could be used for useful things potentially, you know, if developers come up with some ideas for that or something. This is Microsoft all over again.

Techies of course can speculate and hope and fill in some possible use cases, and it'll maybe move a few units for a short while as a lot of gimmick tech does, but to the general market this is one big 'huh?'

Use cases, folks. Use cases.

If VR/AR technology takes off (as Facebook, microsoft, and Google believe it will), this provides a convenient, accessible, and cheap means to produce content. No specific use-case needs to be established yet IMHO.

Not really. Just having a depth camera doesn't help with content creation. You need a lot of other pipelines to work.

See:

A Large Dataset of Object Scans

Sungjoon Choi , Qian-Yi Zhou, Stephen Miller, and Vladlen Koltun

Well, for what it's worth we are actually doing the best use case of this (AR home furnishings design) with inside out 6DOF markerless tracking on iPhone and iPad without needing the Tango system.

Monocular visual odometry is becoming good enough that depth cameras aren't worth the overhead. Samsung even asked me about a year ago if it was worth doing and I told them no.

Can your system make out where the walls and other objects are in the room in real time, and thus make sure virtual objects do not overlap?

One striking demo of Tango, back when they unveiled their dev platform tablet, was that you could use the tablet to "throw" virtual balls into a random waste basket put on top of a chair. Everything computed in real time based on what the sensors picked up about the world around it.

So if you want to measure up your apartment, all you basically have to do is take a Tango device for a walk around it.

You are basically asking about a few different things - though they are related.

Can your system make out where the walls and other objects are in the room in real time,

The first thing is plane detection and tracking. The answer is somewhat. We can detect and track some planes, but it's not yet up to par with native depth sensing systems in ideal environments. It performs better in high sunlight environments however.

thus make sure virtual objects do not overlap?

This is called occlusion. The short answer is, no right now our system doesn't do occlusion. To do that right, you have to build a high probability real time polygon mesh which we aren't building into a live product yet.

So if you want to measure up your apartment, all you basically have to do is take a Tango device for a walk around it.

There is more than one way to do this. We can do this, but it's not real time - it takes a few minutes. However it's getting faster very quickly and this use case is in the pipeline.

Dedicated sensor hardware blows away laborious fancy math to overcome the limitations of a sensor. Look at the adoption of the Kinect and LIDAR in robotics hardware. No-one is seriously using monocular vision for any kind of serious environmental sensing. Stereo vision + pattern is pretty much the minimum to get satisfactory results.

> No-one is seriously using monocular vision for any kind of serious environmental sensing

I believe Tesla uses a single camera for auto-steering.

Dedicated sensor hardware blows away laborious fancy math to overcome the limitations of a sensor.

This doesn't work at consumer scale.

No-one is seriously using monocular vision for any kind of serious environmental sensing

That's why we're different.

Does Tango come with software to stitch together a 3d model with a texture? For example, could I use it to scan a shoe or other discrete object in front of a bluescreen?

That's probably the first question on any web retailers mind.

They demonstrated several use cases, live: furniture size checking, education about dinosaurs, distance measurements, and entertainment. Really, did you not see that?

Honest question: given the nature of this device (communication), is anyone else nervous about Lenovo, given their recent shenanigans? (One only needs to google "lenovo privacy concerns" to see what I mean.)

Yep, wouldn't touch them with a bargepole

Came here to make the exact same statement.

I am. I have a Thinkpad Yoga which I like but will probably jump ship soon. Maybe to Dell and Ubuntu.

Non-engadget link for those who have given up on them (I can't possibly be the only one):

http://bgr.com/2016/06/09/lenovo-phab2-pro-release-date-pric...

For the uninitiated? What did they do now?

What finally made me drop them was when they posted a cartoon of a dude with his pants around his ankles using a fleshlight (or similar) to their front page. IT pros might (legitimately) be reading Engadget at work, and they basically put a giant cartoon porn picture on their front page. The article itself was about the author's personal experience trying a few modern masturbation devices. Seemed inappropriate for the market they're in. Left permanently.

So you link to bgr instead?

This article demonstrates better what this could be used for:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/heres-an-actual-3d-indoor-m...

That's the 3D model that Google created in partnership with Matterport (Early 2014). However, I am not sure why Matterport has not been mentioned in any of the recent Lenovo Tango products. Neither have they mentioned this specific 3D indoor scanning feature with this phone.

I was curious to find out the quality of the 3D model this phone could scan.

What I found more interesting is that 652 looks a very nice chip and its priced at $500, 1440p, 64G with all the tagno stuff for a specialized product.

Why can't we have a $300-$350 phone with snapdragon 652, 1080p from most manufacturer even Lenovo? I guess they have this ZUK 2 now in the similar price/performance but a sub brand.

This will be interesting when paired with a 3D printer. The tango technology does a really good job of scanning objects and if you export them to a slicer it should be possible to print them. That said, it could also make for a really interesting data "theft" system, being able to derive detailed models from something in a display case for example. http://boingboing.net/2016/02/23/scanning-artists-de-loot-st...

I don't understand why Tango has to be an integrated built-in solution rather than an accessory that could be added to any Android phone.

> I don't understand why Tango has to be an integrated built-in solution rather than an accessory that could be added to any Android phone.

Because hardware accessories still require standardized hardware to work with (or complex adaptors, etc.), and are more cumbersome, which limits their appeal. Tango requires specialized hardware, and it makes a lot more sense to integrate it than to make it an accessory.

Fair, though Flir[0] and Seek[1] both offer thermal cameras as accessories; conversely, there's the Caterpillar S60 phone with built-in (Flir) thermal camera[2]. But the accessory approach does mean more compatibility headaches, no doubt.

0: http://www.flir.com/flirone/ios-android/ 1: http://www.thermal.com/products/compactxr 2: http://gizmodo.com/caterpillars-new-s60-is-the-first-smartph...

Also, because Tango is tightly integrated with the phone IMU

I can't help but feel like at at some point projects tango and ara will merge at or at least cross paths.

Then maybe you'll see vendors offering a combination of tango and base-level frames? Just switch between them as required.

you need something like Nvidia Tegra or Qualcomm Snapdragon for Tango

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