TIMOTHY JORDAN: Hello, and welcome
to "The Developer Show."
This is your TL;DR.
Defer actions until the user has stable connectivity
with the new web API Background Sync.
Check out how with the link below.
It just became a lot easier to see
any issues you have with certificates
and mixed content with the Security Panel
introduced with Chrome 48.
The blog post and video have details on how to use it.
Learn how to use JavaScript Promises
for deferred and asynchronous computation with this course
built in collaboration with you Udacity.
Happy 100th blog post, Apps Script.
Thanks for helping developers create add-ons
for Google Sheets, Docs, or Forms,
automate their workflows, integrate
with external APIs, and more.
Here's a few recent posts to celebrate.
Tips and best practices for developing more complex Apps
Scripts solutions.
A new calendar resource API that enables
Google for Work customers to manage
their physical resources, like conference rooms
and printers, or even nap pods and tennis courts.
And the latest version of the Google Drive
API for a leaner, faster by default, and more consistent
interface to Google Drive.
And although not exactly developer-related,
I just thought this was a really cool article
about a group of doctors that used
Google Cardboard to visualize the anatomy
of a four-month-old girl before a life-saving surgery.
Just a reminder that the stuff we're all working on together
can have a real impact on people's lives.
And finally, Lenovo and Google recently
announced a partnership to create a new mainstream
smartphone with Project Tango built in.
Which, of course, if you haven't already,
makes it a great time to get to know Project Tango.
So we thought for the rest of the show,
we'd hang out with the Project Tango
team at their latest developer workshop in San Francisco.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm standing here with Johnny Lee, who many of you
may recognize from his YouTube video--
the head tracking with the Wii remotes--
and now you're the Technical Program Lead for Project Tango.
JOHNNY LEE: Indeed.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: What is Project Tango,
and what can it mean for users?
JOHNNY LEE: Yeah, so if you think about your ability
to walk through your house, to walk to your office,
you have this amazing ability that you've
evolved where you use your eyesight,
and you use some of your information
from your inner ear to be able to get from room to room,
and get to your living room, walk down the hallway.
And that information is meaningful to you and to me,
but our devices-- like our phones--
really don't have that same sense of physical space.
So what we've been doing with Project Tango
is trying to give our tools this human-scale sense of space
and motion.
And we do that with a combination of sensors
and software [? stacks. ?] So, there's
a special set of cameras that are built
into the mobile device, and we run
a software library on Android that does the sensor fusion.
And we get an accurate, six degree of freedom
position of the device in real time.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's huge.
JOHNNY LEE: So you can almost think of it
like it's a 3D mouse, right?
When you move it, it goes up and down, left and right,
and you can rotate it.
And you can use it to track your position throughout the room.
And that enables things like VR and AR applications--
[? style ?] applications-- but through a little magic window
instead.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Here I am with Eric Johnson, Head of Business
Development for Project Tango.
Hi, Eric.
ERIC JOHNSON: Hey, Timothy.
How's it going?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's going well.
So I wanted to talk to you about Project Tango, obviously.
We're here in San Francisco at a developer
workshop for Project Tango.
Developers are building really cool applications
out there, some of which we'll see in a little bit.
But to start with, what's the big thing that's
happened in Project Tango that's motivating developers the most
right now?
ERIC JOHNSON: So last week we announced
we have a mass-market consumer phone coming this summer.
And so that's really the exciting thing that I think
has woken up the ecosystem.
People have been aware of Project Tango,
but now that it's real-- there's real hardware coming--
developers are much more excited about building something
for that experience when the phone ships.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Yeah, and I mean mass-market consumer phone
sounds like a big thing, but the practical elements of this
is that developers have been experimenting and playing
with Tango.
But now actual users are going to have actual phones
in their pockets this summer.
ERIC JOHNSON: That's right, exactly.
And so what we're doing in parallel
is we're hosting developer workshops every month.
And this is one example, this one here in San Francisco.
This one happens to be focused on location-based experiences.
So Tango does a number of things, one of the things
that it does is provides indoor location and navigation.
And so we've got some awesome brands here.
We've got some retail brands, we've
got Google teams that are here, we've
got developers that work in the location-based environment.
We've got robot companies.
And they're all collaborating together,
and it's awesome to see the demos that are coming out
of these workshops.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
Now if a developer was really interested in Project Tango,
and they wanted to take it to the next level,
I hear you have an app incubator.
Is that right?
ERIC JOHNSON: That's right.
We just announced that last week as well,
when we announced the Lenovo phone at CES.
And I think you're going to show the website here.
We encourage people to go to that website,
check out the app incubator, read the details.
And that's really where we're looking
to go for more of the deep experience we
have with our current app developers
and broaden that out, encourage more developers
to work with us.
And then from that we're investing in some,
we're inviting some to workshops,
we're looking to highlight some at Google I/O,
we're looking to highlight some as we launch the phone.
So that's really the place that people
want to go to learn about developing on Project Tango.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
All right, Eric.
Well, I think we're going to talk to Johnny.
We're going to check out some demos.
ERIC JOHNSON: All right, sounds good.
Thanks for coming up.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: I think there's a lot
to be excited about with Project Tango.
But this is one of those platforms where
I wonder if there's some things where you didn't realize
that they would be as cool as they actually were once you
actually played with them.
Is there anything like that?
JOHNNY LEE: We built a lot of simple code with our SDK,
or tried to provide as much sample code as we can.
And so one of our engineers decided
to make a little virtual pet cat.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Oh, I've seen this cat.
This cat is amazing!
JOHNNY LEE: Yeah, actually it's disappointingly cute.
Or annoyingly cute, I'll put it that way.
So it's a little 3D cat, he runs around on the ground.
But it uses the sensors to actually detect
where the floors are.
It can actually jump on your bed and jump on the table,
and when you get close to the cat, he'll paw at the screen.
It's really cute, and you can show it
to people who are unfamiliar with technology,
and they get engaged with it.
We picked a friendly cat.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
TIMOTHY JORDAN: For more information on Project Tango,
please check out the links below.
You'll find a link to the presentation at the Ubiquity
Dev Summit, as well as a link to their app incubator.
And remember to come back here every Friday
for a new episode of "The Developer Show."
I'm Timothy Jordan, and I'll see you next week.
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