It is easy to forget that even the simplest movements involve
complex cognitive and physical processes.
The human body alone consists of more than 200 joints
and more than 600 muscles.
And it is this incredibly intricate machine
that allows us to move.
It is the ability to move that has even given humans
the remarkable flexibility to do everything
from landing spaceships on the moon to moon walking on Earth.
Project Tango is a platform for mobile devices
that can interpret human movement
in interesting, new ways.
My name is Nikolai.
And in this video, I will show you
the basics of designing apps and games with motion tracking that
feels natural to users.
When designing for motion, you have
to consider how a user moves naturally,
which physical setting they will be in,
and why they need to move.
You may have seen how mobile devices can
track movement in games and apps by using rotational tracking.
You may have used it to look around
Google Street View on racing games
to control the steering wheel.
However, if you only track the device rotation,
you have to come up with other ways to move in the app.
You can do so by tapping on the screen
or by using virtual D-Pads to go places.
If the user is looking at a virtual moon colony,
like here, they can use the device rotation to look around.
But they need another input method,
like virtual D-Pads to move around.
The lack of fine-grain tracking in current mobile devices
limits what we can do with them.
And Project Tango device solves these problems
by adding a camera system that, like us humans,
uses visual recognition to keep track of itself.
This allows the user to not only rotate, but also
move the device in any direction they choose
and see it reflected in their app.
You can implement this on a small scale.
The users can use this input method
to view the moon colony while sitting at a table.
This works great if the virtual world is small.
In this example, we have constrained the users
so they don't get up and walk away.
But what if the user did get up and walked away?
Project Tango can track a large scale too.
This means the user does not need to stay seated
but can move around freely and naturally.
In that case, the user will have a much larger play space
and could explore more of the colony
or the craters of the moon.
In the virtual worlds we create, you
can do things you can't do in real life.
You can run really, really fast and move very, very slowly.
This is how it looks if we move at normal speed.
So if you're tracking the user's movement
through the physical world, a safe bet
is to map the physical motion proportionally to the virtual.
If we once again walk at normal speed,
but slow down the user's virtual movement,
it can look like this.
Notice how we have to walk really far before we
get past that building block?
Not only is this not very exciting,
it can create a feeling that the entire system is
unable to keep up or that everything in the world
is unnaturally big.
On the other hand, it would be great
if we could move at supersonic speed in the virtual world
instead, right?
Not so fast.
If we speed up motion so you only
have to walk a little to get far,
things can start to feel jittery.
In other words, things are easiest to comprehend and use
if they behave naturally like we're used to.
At times, there may be good reasons
to letting the user move faster or slower than they really are.
For example, if they are attempting to sight
see the entire moon on foot or probing very tiny moon rocks.
In these cases, we have found that providing a way
to manually adjust the speed makes it less confusing,
such as a Speed Boost button to skip the boring bits on the way
to the moon crater.
When you integrate motion tracking
in the user experience, think about what kind you need.
Are you creating a small world that
fits on a table or will it require the whole building
to fit?
You will need to decide on rotation, small scale,
large scale, a combination for the tracking, and how to make
it feel natural.
Users always have expectations, even when bouncing around
their virtual space colony.
Visit our Google+ community and join us in our journey.
We are excited to see what you will build with Project Tango.
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