Your phone may soon sense everything around you
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Suppose your smartphone is clever enough to grasp your physical surroundings - the room's size, the location of doors and windows and the presence of other people. What could it do with that info?
We're about to get our first look. On Thursday, Lenovo will give consumers their first chance to buy a phone featuring Google's 3-year-old Project Tango, an attempt to imbue machines with a better understanding about what's around them.
Location tracking through GPS and cell towers tells apps where you are, but not much more. Tango uses software and sensors to track motions and size up the contours of rooms, empowering Lenovo's new phone to map building interiors. That's a crucial building block of a promising new frontier in "augmented reality," or the digital projection of lifelike images and data into a real-life environment.
If Tango fulfills its promise, furniture shoppers will be able to download digital models of couches, chairs and coffee tables to see how they would look in their actual living rooms. Kids studying the Mesozoic Era would be able to place a virtual Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor in their home or classroom - and even take selfies with one. The technology would even know when to display information about an artist or a scene depicted in a painting as you stroll through a museum.
Tango will be able to create internal maps of homes and offices on the fly. Google won't need to build a mapping database ahead of time, as it does with existing services like Google Maps and Street View. Nonetheless, Tango could raise fresh concerns about privacy if controls aren't stringent enough to prevent the on-the-fly maps from being shared with unauthorized apps or heisted by hackers.
Lenovo announced its plans for the Tango phone in January, but Thursday will mark the first time that the company is showing the device publicly. At the Lenovo Tech World conference in San Francisco, the Chinese company is expected to announce the phone's price and release date.
The efforts come as phone sales are slowing. People have been holding off on upgrades, partly because they haven't gotten excited about the types of technological advances hitting the market during the past few years. Phones offering intriguing new technology could help spur more sales.
But Tango's room-mapping technology is probably still too abstract to gain mass appeal right away, says Ramon Llamas, an analyst at the IDC research group.
"For most folks, this is still a couple steps ahead of what they can wrap their brains around, so I think there's going to be a long gestation period," Llamas says.
Other smartphones promising quantum leaps have flopped. Remember Amazon's Fire phone released with great fanfare two years ago? That souped-up phone featured four front-facing cameras and a gyroscope so some images could be seen in three dimensions. The device also offered a tool called Firefly that could be used to identify objects and sounds. But the Fire fizzled, and Amazon no longer even sells the phone.
The key to the Tango phone's success is likely to hinge on the breadth of compelling apps that people find useful in their everyday lives. If history is any guide, the early apps may be more demonstrative than practical.
Google already has released experimental Tango devices designed for computer programmers, spurring them to build about 100 apps that will work with Lenovo's new phone. At a conference for developers last month, Google demonstrated an app for picturing furniture in actual living rooms and for taking selfies with digital dinosaurs.
Both large and small tech companies are betting that augmented realty, or AR, will take off sooner than later. Microsoft has been selling a $3,000 prototype of its HoloLens AR headset. Others, such as Facebook's Oculus and Samsung, are out with virtual-reality devices. Google has one coming as well through its Daydream project. While AR tries to blend the artificial with your actual surroundings, virtual reality immerses its users in a setting that's entirely fabricated.
With both, the devices out so far invariably require users to wear a headset or glasses. In many cases, they also must be tethered to more powerful personal computers, restricting the ability to move around.
None of that is necessary with Lenovo's Tango phone. Instead, you get an augmented look at your surroundings through the phone's screen.
"This has a chance to become pervasive because it's integrated into a device that you already have with you all the time," says Jeff Meredith, a Lenovo vice president who oversaw development of the Tango device. "You aren't going to have to walk around a mall wearing a headset."
Google plans to bring Tango to other phones, but is focusing on the Lenovo partnership this year, according to Johnny Lee, a Google executive who oversaw the team that developed the technology.
Tango drew upon previous research in robotics and the U.S. space program. Lee believes three-dimensional imagery and data - whether through the new Tango phone or another technology - will help reshape the way people interact with e-commerce, education and gaming.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TEC_ROOM_SENSING_PHONE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-06-08-15-19-39
I guess due process is being decided, not by judge and jury anymore
OHP Uses New Device To Seize Money Used During The Commission Of A Crime
OKLAHOMA CITY -
You may have heard of civil asset forfeiture.
That's where police can seize your property and cash without first proving you committed a crime; without a warrant and without arresting you, as long as they suspect that your property is somehow tied to a crime.
Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards.
It's called an ERAD, or Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machine, and state police began using 16 of them last month.
Here's how it works. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money.
"We're gonna look for different factors in the way that you're acting,” Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. John Vincent said. “We're gonna look for if there's a difference in your story. If there's someway that we can prove that you're falsifying information to us about your business."
Troopers insist this isn't just about seizing cash.
"I know that a lot of people are just going to focus on the seizing money. That's a very small thing that' s happening now. The largest part that we have found ... the biggest benefit has been the identity theft," Vincent said.
"If you can prove can prove that you have a legitimate reason to have that money it will be given back to you. And we've done that in the past," Vincent said about any money seized.
State Sen. Kyle Loveless, R-Oklahoma City, said that removes due process and the belief that a suspect is presumed innocent until proven guilty. He said we've already seen cases in Oklahoma where police are abusing the system.
"We've seen single mom's stuff be taken, a cancer survivor his drugs taken, we saw a Christian band being taken. We've seen innocent people's stuff being taken. We've seen where the money goes and how it's been misspent," Loveless said.
Loveless plans to introduce legislation next session that would require a conviction before any assets could be seized.
"If I had to err on the side of one side versus the other, I would err on the side of the Constitution,” Loveless said. “And I think that's what we need to do."
News 9 obtained a copy of the contract with the state.
It shows the state is paying ERAD Group Inc., $5,000 for the software and scanners, then 7.7 percent of all the cash the highway patrol seizes.
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