TIMOTHY JORDAN: Hi, I'm Timothy Jordan
and this is the Developer Show on location at Google I/O 2016,
and I'm here with Noah.
We're going to talk about Project Tango.
Now, there is a Project Tango game
that people are playing with here
in the Sandbox called "World."
Can you tell us a little bit about it?
NOAH FALSTEIN: So this is a game that's
being done by a new company called [? Phenomena, ?] but
with some very old and experienced game developers,
including a designer called Keita Takahashi.
He worked on a game called "Katamari Damacy."
TIMOTHY JORDAN: It's an awesome game.
NOAH FALSTEIN: Oh, just great stuff.
But very playful approach, and he's brought that to "World."
It's a game where you can actually
set up little things in a virtual world that
are situated in the real world.
So as you move around with the Tango device,
you can actually see them from different angles
and set them up on the real walls and floors of your room.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Now, you were telling me
a little bit earlier about the first steps
you take into the game.
What is that like?
NOAH FALSTEIN: Sure.
Well, at the beginning, one of the things that you do,
for example, is you're given a little seedling,
and you can plant that in the ground.
And then perhaps on a nearby wall, you can take a cloud,
but the cloud is actually on a spring,
so you put it on the wall and it goes boing, boing, boing.
You can click on the cloud and it starts raining,
and suddenly the seed will sprout and turn into a flower.
So it's stuff everybody understands intuitively,
but then you can play with the stuff,
put the flower on top of another flower,
have them start rotating, make them bigger or smaller.
Whole thing just opens it up as a playground for you to try.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Something I've heard
you talk about before which I really
loved in Project Tango is the ability
to make any space a play space, which seems
to be evident in this game.
NOAH FALSTEIN: So one of the great things
is that you can use the Tango device to actually
have it be sort of a magic window into a virtual world
that you create or has been created by the developer
so that as you move it around, it's
as if you're seeing right into this other space that
isn't even there.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's really cool.
NOAH FALSTEIN: It's great stuff.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: One more general question for you.
What is your favorite thing about being
a game designer and developer?
NOAH FALSTEIN: Wow.
I think the best thing about being a game designer
is that you get to make things that you enjoy,
that are fun, that please the rest of the world.
It's pretty much like other entertainers,
just a lot more nerdy than being a rock star, for example.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
Thank you so much, Noah.
NOAH FALSTEIN: All right, thank you, Timothy.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Eitan, let's talk more about Project Tango.
What do you say?
EITAN MARDER EPPSTEIN: Absolutely.
Why not?
TIMOTHY JORDAN: So there's a handful of things
that I'd like to ask you about.
First off, it's been a few months since we've talked,
and we talked a little bit about stuff coming up at I/O
this year.
What are some of the highlights?
EITAN MARDER-EPPSTEIN: Yeah, so this year at I/O,
we've announced a couple of things.
So the first one is we've made some improvements
in our meshing APIs, and the second
is that we're announcing that a month from now
we're going to be releasing some improvements in area learning
APIs.
And specifically, we'll be correcting
for drift of the device as it moves around an object that
should keep your augmented reality content really fixed
in the world in a nice way.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And that's really
key for augmented reality.
In fact, we talked to Noah about "World,"
where it's kind of making the real space around you
a play space by adding virtual objects,
and something like that drift compensation
would be really key for keeping those virtual objects
where you place them.
EITAN MARDER-EPPSTEIN: Exactly.
You want to lock those objects in place
relative to the geometry of your physical environments,
and that's something we're really
excited to be able to provide to our developers.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's really cool.
EITAN MARDER-EPPSTEIN: Yeah.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: What are some of the coolest,
most exciting things that they're working on?
EITAN MARDER-EPPSTEIN: Yeah, so this year
we're really excited because we're
building real apps for our consumer launch,
and we're showing some of them in our booth today.
So we've got "Measurements," which I really like.
So you can use your Tango device as a tape measure, measure
from the floor to the ceiling or in hard-to-reach places,
measure things like areas and volumes very easily.
Then we've got at-home retail, so we've
got companies like Lowe's and Wayfair
who are trying to place furniture and kitchen
appliances into your home, let you visualize how they look,
see how it fits in your space-- make sure that you're
good to go before you buy online,
and sort of reduce the number of returns
and give people a better sense of interior decoration.
And then we've got gaming.
So we've got "World" by Phenomena,
we've got [? Trixy ?] Studios with their [? "Phantageist" ?]
game.
And it's really exciting to see people brought
into their environment, engage with their environment,
but also with, like, virtual creatures thrown
in for good measure.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's so cool.