LAURENCE MORONEY: A couple of weeks ago on "Coffee
with a Googler," we met with Justin Quimby,
and we spoke about Tango and all the cool things
that are happening with Tango.
So now we're in Mountain View.
We're at the Tango Summit, and Justin's here,
so we're going to go upstairs and catch up with him.
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We're here now at the Tango Summit in Mountain View,
and Justin's back to catch up with us and tell us
what's new and exciting.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Well, what's new and exciting is we launched.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Wow.
Woohoo.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: So yeah, it's really exciting.
The Lenovo Phab 2 Pro went on sale
at the beginning of November worldwide,
and we've already got dozens of apps in the Play Store
that people are building.
And part of the reason we're so thrilled about this event
this week is when last we chatted,
I was talking about how this is the beginning
of the ecosystem for smartphone augmented reality applications.
And we're here to help some folks spread
the word about Tango and how to build great apps for the Phab 2
Pro and other Tango-enabled smartphones.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Super cool.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah.
And one of the coolest things is we're
starting to see apps in the Play Store
that we didn't know about.
One of the really exciting things
about this organic growth in the app ecosystem
is it means that people are getting excited about it
with us, without us simply saying, hey, hey, hey,
built that.
Build an app.
Which means that people are seeing
value in what Tango provides to the smartphone ecosystem.
I mean, we've got apps that-- I think
I saw you fail pretty badly at Jenga earlier.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I thought you were supposed
to knock the tower over.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah, of course.
For you, you're totally supposed to knock it down.
Games are a natural place to use augmented reality
in a smartphone form factor.
But it's not just about games.
Shopping is also another fantastic area
where people are starting to build
apps that take advantage of the Tango stack
to really bring value and utility to their users.
So iStaging and Wayfair and Lowe's and Amazon,
and a bunch of other folks, are all
building apps that use the Tango technology.
It's not just about the app ecosystem and developers
getting excited about what's happening with the hardware
and software.
We're also starting to see larger and larger organizations
get excited about Tango technology.
Now, earlier this year, we actually
had a hackathon in Shenzhen, China.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Aha.
I've been to Shenzhen.
It's a nice place.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: It's a crazy town.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Oh, yeah.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: It's a crazy town.
The reason it was particularly exciting
is there were over 200 teams working on Tango applications.
And the prime minister of China held a Phab 2 Pro--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: And got a demo of some of them.
So the thing that's exciting about it is we
start to see not just individuals
and small companies, but bigger and bigger
companies, and actually governments,
see value in this technology.
The snowball has just started rolling down the hill.
And part of the thing that I love about events
like this week is you get to talk
to folks who are going to go out and spread the word about Tango
and get the developer community excited.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Nice.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: And we can't wait.
We just cannot wait to see what developers come up with with
this technology stack.
Because we've built this set of tools,
and there are problems out there that we don't even know about.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Sure.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: And we can't wait for people
to use this technology in new and interesting ways
to do things that we haven't even thought of.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And speaking of snowballs, I
heard there's one app that models the entire solar system.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Oh, yeah.
So shopping, gaming, and then there's a whole education one.
Now, we actually had an incubator
to help some developers build apps.
And one of the apps that came out of it
is just a fantastic demonstration
of how this kind of technology can be
used for educational purposes.
Now, I don't know about you, but when
I went through elementary school and they
had the classes on the solar system,
and you're sort of sitting there,
and they start talking about how many hundreds of thousands
of miles are between Neptune and Pluto--
LAURENCE MORONEY: A lot more that.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah.
And is Pluto still a planet or not?
And you know?
This app lets you, then, place a digital model of the sun all
the way to the outer planets, and then you
see them, at scale, placed.
And it really drives home how close
Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Earth are
to the sun compared to Neptune and Saturn and Jupiter.
And also, the vast quantities of space
between Jupiter and Saturn.
Seeing that, sort of kinestheticall
exploring that by walking around,
has a whole different impact as opposed
to just reading numbers on a page
or maybe looking at a picture.
And so that's the sort of application
where-- there's this use case where
I want to see the path of X, Y, or Z spacecraft.
Hey, maybe I want to be able to plot my own spacecraft
and see-- what would it take to actually get a spacecraft
to then orbit Jupiter?
And so suddenly, as opposed to writing code on a computer,
or drawing out things, suddenly I
can start navigating through space with this device.
And this becomes a window into a whole nother world.
And it unlocks all of this potential.
And this is one app, right?
LAURENCE MORONEY: And you've got dozens already.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah, we've already got dozens,
and we expect to have hundreds very soon.
And so for us, this is where we can't
wait to see what the developer community comes up with.
Because a diversity of authorship,
when it comes to apps, is so important.
We can't just have apps made by folks here in San Francisco,
or here in Mountain View.
We need apps made worldwide.
And that, for me, is part of the exciting thing about the Lenovo
device being sold worldwide.
Because we've got developers in Shenzhen, Beijing, Seoul,
Berlin, Cairo-- all over the planet-- developing
apps for it.
And I can't wait to see what they built.
LAURENCE MORONEY: I'm going to have to ask Santa for one.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yes.
That's a good idea.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So now, for developers all over the world,
now that the device is available,
what advice would you give them?
What's the best way to get started?
How can they get up and running?
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Well, so we've got a great site
at developers.google.com/tango, which I hope will be
in the comments below on this video.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right down there.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah, right down there.
And we've got all sorts of example applications.
So whether you're a Unity developer, or Unreal,
or you actually are an Android developer using Java,
or you just want to use the Tango APIs and see,
we've got sample code as well as documentation
for each of those paths.
And then we've also got, on GitHub,
a whole bunch of example apps that you can then
fork, tweak, play with.
Whenever I talk to developers, the first thing I recommend
is-- all right.
Take one of those apps.
Just get it running on a device.
And then pick a model, pick any model-- perhaps a Jenga piece,
or a model of Mars-- and then place that digital object
in the real world.
Once you've got that up and running,
you're off to the races.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Right.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: And then you can explore
all of the advanced capabilities that Tango provides
on top of the Android stack.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Cool.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: So-- and that's the other thing to think about,
is that Tango is a capability for this device.
It's not just about motion-tracking and
area-learning and depth-sensing.
We're building on top of all the other capabilities that Android
devices have today-- so notifications, payment systems,
ads, like all this stuff--
LAURENCE MORONEY: All these things
have become possible, yeah.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Those are all layered.
You can layer into your app.
So really, it's start small.
Get something, start playing with it,
and then start thinking about the challenges that you face.
Think about the challenges your users face.
And how could this technology, knowing
where this device is at any given point in time,
and how it moves through space, how
could you use that to help solve your user's problems?
And delight and surprise your users?
One of our favorite apps is the Dominoes app,
where you place digital dominoes down on a board.
And part of the thing that's fantastic about that
is suddenly it's not just about these digital objects that
are dominoes, but you can add additional behavior
on top of them.
And now imagine you're playing a Jenga game,
but one of the pieces is actually a bomb.
And when you try to move it, it actually
blows up part of that stack.
LAURENCE MORONEY: That's what happened to me.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yes, that was completely
what happened to you in that game of Jenga.
So suddenly, all of the behaviors,
all of these digital objects, can
have lives of their own, can have behaviors of their own,
that make these apps even better.
LAURENCE MORONEY: And the neat thing about Dominoes
is that if you do it in the real world,
you're constrained to the physical number of dominoes
you have.
If you're doing it in this, you can continually add dominoes.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Exactly.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Or you can change gravity,
so that sometimes they fall that way,
sometimes they fall upwards.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah.
And there's another great game which is a Hot Wheels
track-builder game.
So you're placing digital track and racing digital Hot Wheels
cars around it.
And I don't know about you, but one of the--
LAURENCE MORONEY: Never enough track.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: There's never enough track.
And also, you've never managed to pick up
all of your Hot Wheels cars.
And so at some point later, you're
walking around your house in your bare feet,
and you step on one.
And ooh, does that hurt.
So now, suddenly, you're no longer
constrained by the physical products you have.
Now you can start building with these digital objects,
and building crazy digital worlds that interact
with your real environment.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Super cool.
So before we wrap up, there was one question
that we had from a viewer of the previous show.
And that was that when you were talking about all these things,
he was envisioning the holographic chess
from "Star Wars."
Remember that?
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yes.
Yes.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So are you working on anything like that?
Or what do you think about it?
JUSTIN QUIMBY: So digital objects
like holographic chess-- it's a fantastic idea.
And we'd love to see you build it.
We've actually had a couple of folks come to us
and say, hey, we want to build this kind of app.
And we're like, well, here's the sample code.
And they're off to the races.
LAURENCE MORONEY: So, but just don't play it against a Wookiee
because I hear they pull your arms out
of the sockets when they lose.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah.
Yeah.
It's always wise to let the Wookiee win.
LAURENCE MORONEY: OK.
Sounds good.
Well, thanks, Justin.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Hey, it's great to see you again.
LAURENCE MORONEY: It was great catching up.
Looking forward to playing with these devices.
Looking forward to seeing how these apps work.
And I'm going to start walking from the sun
to Pluto in augmented reality, and I should
get there by next Tuesday.
JUSTIN QUIMBY: Yeah.
Perfect.
Thanks so much.
LAURENCE MORONEY: Thank you.
Be sure to check out the rest of the "Coffee with a Googler"
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