How George Washington University is shaping a piece of Google’s smartphone future

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In the labs of George Washington University, students are laboring in labs covered in black-and-white dotted paper, puzzling out how to make a machine that understands images like the human brain.

It’s a question that Google is trying to tackle in typical Silicon Valley fashion with Project Tango, a smartphone that will use its sensors to map the environment around its users in real time. But this research isn't restricted to the secret labs of West Coast tech giants.

A piece of it is happening right here in Washington. The vision for Tango is to make a phone that can not only recognize places -- so you can, for example, navigate within a store to find a product on a shelf -- but also potentially tap into large-scale 3-D maps to help the phone better understand the scene. Think of it as more detailed version of Google Maps.

In a mall, a Tango phone could direct you to the nearest restroom by using a meaningful 3-D map of the mall. (Google hasn’t said when the phone could be released.) At George Washington, the scientists have been helping Google deal with the basics: getting the phone to understand its own sensors and the images it sees to understand how what its sensing matches up with what it expects.


How George Washington University is shaping a piece of Google’s smartphone future