[MUSIC PLAYING]
LAURENCE MORONEY: Welcome to "Coffee with a Googler."
In this episode, I'm going to be chatting
with Justin Quimby who's a PM on the Tango platform.
If you're not familiar with Tango,
it's all about augmented reality.
And this guy gets to work with the partners that
are building really cool, crazy augmented reality concepts,
and he's going to come tell us all about them.
So Justin, you're a Product Manager here at Google
working on Tango.
Can you tell us all about it, and tell us about yourself?
JUSTIN QUIMBY: I actually joined the team about a year ago.
And it's been really exciting, because I
worked in the video game [INAUDIBLE] prior to that.
I spent 15 years, actually, making video games.
I worked on Dungeons and Dragons online and Lord of the Rings
online at Turbine back in Boston.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I'm not worthy.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: And then on top of that,
actually what brought me out to California
was to work at Electronic Arts on Spore with Will Wright.
Then I did a whole series of small start-ups, many of them
buzz worthy wordy and mobile social HTML 5
free-to-play games.
But for me, after doing games for both PC and then
mobile titles, I started looking around.
And I said, well, what's next?
And I started looking at VR.
And I've been a huge fan of VR ever since the 80s.
And I started thinking about, well, VR is great.
What about augmented reality.
I had seen little snippets of what
Johnny Lee had been working on in the game development
community.
And I said, all right, I want to go work
at Google with Johnny Lee and work on the team for Tango.
And so that's led me here today to be Senior Product
Manager working on Tango, helping
build the third party developer ecosystem
for the Tango platform and Google's larger AR platform.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
So what's involved in building the partner ecosystem?
JUSTIN QUIMBY: It's really fun.
You get to go out and talk to a lot of people.
But part of it is about explaining
what is augmented reality and what is
smartphone augmented reality.
And also, I get to have the fun job of telling people, hey,
it's not just a theoretical lab project.
It's actually shipping.
So we've got the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro,
which is the first Tango-enabled smartphone, shipping this year.
And it's the first of many phones
that are going to be coming out with the technology.
And so it's a really exciting opportunity
for developers to start creating apps and games that
take advantage of all the additional capabilities
that Tango brings to a smartphone.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And I think it's
interesting from the developer perspective,
because not everybody has these phones yet.
But if you start building now, then you
can get to define the category.
And when I think about it, you're
right, because when App stores and Play stores first came out,
there weren't that many apps.
And the first app that did photo filters
to enhance your photos-- that kind of thing--
that got to define a category, that got to be huge.
And so for developers now, it's almost like,
don't blink, or you might miss the opportunity.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: And the other thing that's great
is that there is a burgeoning set of tools with Unity
and Unreal and other 3D engines to enable developers
to create 3D applications for Tango-enabled smartphones very,
very easily.
So you don't have to build your own graphics engine.
You don't have to build your own particle systems.
You don't have to build X, Y, and Z.
Think about all the logging in metric systems, all
the analytics tools that we have today.
Those didn't really exist in a mature form
when Android first came on the scene.
And so developers, at that point,
were really throwing darts, trying to figure out what
features people liked, what they didn't.
Whereas today, you can study that
on day one with their well-established beta channel
systems-- all those mechanisms and tools
to help build great apps.
And it really is up to developers.
And here's a present.
Here's a present, developers, of knowing where your device is
as it moves through space and time and the ability
to put digital objects in the real world
and pin them to the physical world.
What could you do with that?
Is that putting a miniature wrestler on the table
and having him wrestle?
LAURENCE MORONEY: Has somebody done that?
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Oh, yes.
We, in fact, have a developer, Adi,
that's making an app Holo, which is all about taking
augmented reality photos.
It's all about taking hollow photos.
Think about the holochess from "Star Wars"
where suddenly there's a table that has
all these things moving around.
We can start doing that kind of stuff with Tango today.
The field is wide open for developers.
What is their idea?
And with Unity Unreal, it is very quick
to take an idea from a pure idea to a working prototype.
LAURENCE MORONEY: You must have worked
with some really cool and fun and crazy scenarios.
Can you share any of them?
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Oh, yeah.
So I think part of the fun is when
you can put digital objects in the real world.
Suddenly that means, well, if I want to take a photo of you--
you're having a photo here.
That's great.
But what if I can insert-- suddenly
I've got 15 little wrestlers from various sizes,
all posing behind you.
Augmented reality means that not only can you
insert digital objects into the real world,
but you can also replace objects from the real world
with digital ones.
So suddenly you could put a artificial green screen here.
And so you and I, as opposed to having coffee here,
we might be having coffee at this table on a beach.
That sounds pretty good.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Can we do that?
Maybe not coffee if we're on the beach.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yes, that's true.
Margaritas on the beach.
We need to get new mugs, though.
When you have developers thinking
about what kind of crazy stuff could they
bring from the digital world into the real world,
you start thinking about, well, a picture frame
doesn't actually have to have real world information in it.
Now suddenly this picture frame could have my rolling Twitter
stream.
One of the great uses-- and I admit
now, my bias coming from the games industry--
is that third person, God-style interaction
games are great with Tango, because you can place
a digital world on a tabletop and suddenly interact with it
in an entirely different fashion,
because you're not constrained to a flat screen.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And a small flat screen.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: And a small [INAUDIBLE].
Now this becomes your magic window
into this digital world projected into the real one.
And so suddenly now this could be a cityscape.
I could be putting down hundreds and hundreds of dominoes.
And I don't know about you, when I
was playing with dominoes when I was a kid,
there was always a very small number.
And we could never have enough.
Now suddenly there's an unlimited number of dominoes
you could place.
We've got a developer working with Mattel on a Hot Wheels
game.
And yeah, it's really cool.
So you can actually lay out digital track
and then put your different cars-- tweak and tune
your cars-- and have them racing around the tracks, which
is something as a kid, I always had my one little Hot Wheels
car.
And I tried to make tracks for it.
And occasionally my dad--
LAURENCE MORONEY: There was never enough track.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: It was never enough track.
My dad would step on the car and break the axle.
Maybe my dog would knock over the little ramp
I'd built out of wooden blocks.
Now suddenly you can do all of that with digital building
blocks.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And then you look through this little window
into your augmented world of Hot Wheels.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah, exactly.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Very cool.
So if I'm to get started with all this,
what's the best way to get started for you?
JUSTIN QUIMBY: The fastest way is to go
to developers.google.com/Tango and there's--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Easy to remember.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah, easy to remember.
And there's all sorts of information
there, whether you are a Unity or Unreal developer
and you're familiar with those platforms,
or even if you're just a standard Android developer
and you know Java, we've got Java SDK.
You can get up and running in less than a day.
We've got tons of sample applications.
We've got sample code on GitHub.
We've got active developer forums.
And we're really excited to have new folks come to the platform
and show us what's possible, because that's
one of the things that's fantastic is that someone
working on an idea, in a day or two
can actually turn that idea-- that can be
the seed of a massive business.
LAURENCE MORONEY: There's a whole new set of categories
out there that we haven't discovered yet.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: And it's really exciting
because developers each have a different set of problems
that they personally experience, their families,
their communities.
We don't know every problem that will be solved by Tango.
But we believe, and I strongly believe,
that it is an amazing technology to help take your smartphone
to be a next generation smartphone.
And then what are all the crazy and awesome applications
that developers are going to come up with,
utilizing this technology stack?
LAURENCE MORONEY: So if the Tango smartphone
is the next generation smartphone,
there's a great opportunity for us
to be next generation developers.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah, exactly.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thanks so much for coming.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Thanks so much for having me.
It's been a ton of fun.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Appreciate it.
So if you want to learn more, take a look
at the description in this video.
And we've put some great links in there.
If you've any questions for me or if you
have any questions for Justin, just ask them below.
And don't forget to hit that Subscribe button.
Thank you.