[MUSIC PLAYING]
I'm Noah Falstein.
I'm chief game designer at Google.
And this is my 36th year in the games industry and also
GDC number 28.
So I've worked on a lot of games,
and it's taught me to be a survivor
in this industry that's constantly reinventing itself.
If you've been in the games industry
for 10 years, maybe even five, you've
seen how you're constantly having to learn new skills
and explore new horizons.
And there have been a lot of boom and bust cycles
over the years.
I put numbers on this chart originally,
but it's actually different for all of us.
But really groundbreaking things-- things
like the first game consoles out there or the onset of the world
wide web or smartphones-- those kinds
of things come around only once every decade or so.
And we're due for another revolution that's every bit as
big and as important as those.
I think this is something called transmogrified reality.
It's really a mix of virtual reality,
augmented reality, and a lot of other new technologies
and some emerging ones that are finally showing promise
that they've been promising to us for many years.
But specifically-- tomorrow I'll go into more depth
on that at 4:30.
Right now, I'd like to focus on one essential component
to what's going to make this all work out-- Google's Project
Tango.
So how many of you have heard of Project Tango?
OK.
Anybody have a developer kit?
OK.
There's a couple of them out there.
He's a cheater.
It was just announced last June.
And it's a sensor platform that's
designed to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding
of their surroundings.
So they can basically see what's in the room around them.
That means that now a phone or a tablet
can know precisely where it is while moving in 3D space.
It can sense the depth of objects in a near view.
And it can also learn and remember and map
the area around it.
So in 15-second chunks, a little bit more info.
First, motion tracking it does with six degrees of freedom,
using a wide-angle camera and data
from high-res accelerometers and gyroscopes
to follow the tablet through space, back and forth, all six
degrees of freedom.
Second, it's got a depth sensor that
can bounce infrared light off of objects and surfaces that
range from about half a meter out to three meters in range.
And it passes that information back to the API.
And I'll be showing a video of some
of that working in tomorrow's talk.
Third, a Tango device has the ability to learn and remember
its surroundings, and it recognizes those areas
on a subsequent pass-through and then refines its map each time.
So it gets an increasingly better model
as it goes through the same area.
And this has tremendous implications
for business apps and also other non-entertainment applications.
So for one thing, consider how great
it would be for real estate sales and rentals
to be able to scan in a room or an apartment
and view your existing furniture in the new place in real time.
But what about games?
Well, in the past, new technologies
have enabled new game genres.
And I think this is going to be no different than that.
All the while, while you're working on these new genres,
you'll also be learning about things
that are going to be really important in this new mobile VR
market that's going to be a big deal in the next few years.
So one way is to consider that Tango is
a window into a virtual world.
There have been previous three degrees of freedom solutions
that mean you can stand in one place and sort of pivot
the phone or tablet around and look into a virtual world.
And that's not bad.
But Tango lets you go into the six degrees of freedom.
So you're not only pivoting in place,
but you can move from side to side, up and down.
And it knows where you, how high off the ground.
And you can translate and scale that.
It doesn't have to be a one-to-one scale
as you do that for your game.
Or maybe even more important, Tango
can allow people to quickly scan in their surroundings, both
the boundaries of the room and its contents.
And that'll let you make games in places
where people actually live, which I think
is going to be very exciting.
So for example, a whole new genre of games
would be actual stealth games.
You don't just cause an avatar to move around.
You actually move stealthily yourself.
So imagine a spy game where you're actually
moving through a maze of laser detectors,
never exceeding one foot per second of velocity,
perhaps watching yourself mirrored on an Android TV.
Or, for more visceral content, if you scan in your home
and have that be the setting of a procedurally
generated action game or maybe a mystery or maybe a horror
thriller.
And think how much more immersive
it'll be when you stop playing that horror thriller,
and you take the headset off, but you're still
in the same room.
Interesting stuff.
So head-mounted displays-- I'm implying
that we'll move into that.
I think that's a logical next step.
And consider that a Tango head-mounted display could
let the real world through with its camera
or replace real obstacles with virtual images to any degree
that it wants, maybe even allowing
us to move untethered through space safely.
But those are just some of our ideas.
We're here because we want you to apply for the Tango Program,
get a developer kit, make your own blend
of the real and the virtual.
And Google tango dev kit for more info.
We'll also have demos on the expo floor starting Wednesday,
as well as Project Cardboard, which
is really relevant to this.
And you can sign up to buy a dev system there.
And thanks.
I can't wait to see what you guys create for all of us.
[APPLAUSE]