In June of this year, Lenovo released the world’s first AR smartphone Phab2 Pro equipped with Google’s Tango technology at Tech World (Lenovo Technology Innovation Conference), which became the focus of public opinion. Today, prior to the Phab2 Pro's upcoming public offering, the Tango Maker Marathon Development Competition (Hackathon), which is hosted by Lenovo Accelerator, was officially launched at the Shenzhen Double Innovations event as the highlight of this year's national “Double Creation Weekâ€. .
As the first Tango development contest in China, Lenovo Accelerator has invited a number of industry leaders including senior engineers, senior software system architects, and game engine development engineers from Google Tango to serve as mentors and judges. According to reports, the competition lasted for 4 days and 3 nights. Participants were required to complete AR/VR software application development based on the Tango platform within the specified time and perform live demos and competitions on Lenovo Phab2 Pro mobile phones. The organizing committee will eventually select 1 first prize, 2 second prizes and 3 third prizes from 25 participating teams. In addition to the free acceleration service, the first team will also be provided by Lenovo Accelerator. Up to 1 million yuan investment in the venture seed, and its final work will also have the opportunity to carry public release of Lenovo Phab2 Pro mobile phone.
Regarding the original intention of hosting the contest, Ms. Liang Ying, general manager of Lenovo Accelerator, told Lei Fengwang that, on the one hand, Lenovo hopes to use Hackathon as a way to tap the best technical team; secondly, with the strong brand behind Lenovo, With support from various sources such as the market, technology, and supply chain, the participating teams can also use the shortest time to make more mature products and achieve landing. This is a win-win process.
At the same time, Liang Ying revealed that Lenovo may release its own AR strategy this month. The company hopes to attract more third-party developers by hosting such a software development contest based on hardware products such as Phab2 Pro handsets and AR/VR glasses. Invest in Lenovo's platform for AR/VR development and build a complete AR/VR ecosystem from hardware products to software content.
What needs to be pointed out is that unlike most other venture capital incubators, Liang Ying said that Lenovo's accelerator itself does not particularly value a team's business model or liquidity, but instead pays more attention to the team's technical level. She said: "The employees of Lenovo Accelerator are basically born in Lenovo Research Institute. We hope to be the best technology accelerator in the industry. For example, in the first period, we invested in three precision medical projects. The team is very good. Their technology and algorithms are all internationally leading and ranked second in the world.†Perhaps because of this goal, the first Tango technology R&D competition in China can only come from their hands.
In order to explain to ordinary viewers what exactly is Tango, the organizing committee specifically invited Jason Guo, a research and development engineer of the Google Tango project, to speak at the opening ceremony of the contest. He also accepted Lei Feng network (search for "Lei Feng network" public number. Concerned about the interview.
Guo Xu said that Tango is a space-based sensing technology based on Android phones. Its goal is to make mobile phones as natural as human eyes perceive three-dimensional space. If Kinect is the pioneer of 3D sensing technology, then Tango is even a leader in 3D sensing technology. Tango combines optical sensors, inertial sensors and computer vision technology perfectly.
Guo Xu said that Tango includes three core technologies: motion tracking, depth perception and environmental learning. The motion tracking is based on each frame captured by the camera of the mobile phone. The feature points of the scene are identified by Tango. The data of the accelerometer or gyro built in the mobile phone is used to comprehensively calculate the relative position change of the mobile phone. The relative term here is based on the first frame of the image, but once the device is restarted, this relative becomes meaningless, so this is where environmental learning comes into play.
The so-called environmental learning means that the user needs to perform a comprehensive scan of the environment before using the Tango device, so that the device records all the feature data in the environment, so that when the user returns to this scene, Tango will call the already entered The data corrects the relative displacement of the motion tracking, which gives the absolute position.
However, only the above two points are not enough. To achieve true 3D perception, the most critical aspect is depth perception. Phab2 Pro phone integrates a depth-sensing infrared camera, which can recognize infrared light with different angles reflected from the uneven surface of the phone and calculate the depth information inside the environment by calculating different light paths.
Guo Xu said Tango’s core technologies in these three areas are interrelated, interdependent, and complementary. It is the perfect fusion of these three items that Tango finally achieved the natural perception of the three-dimensional environment as the human eye.
Guo Xu also mentioned that one of the most critical advantages of Tango technology is that it is easy to popularize. He said: "At present, if you want to promote other VR / AR platforms, developers generally need to spend hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars to purchase a device. But Tango different, it uses an existing smart phone platform, if The promotion can easily achieve a very high market share, and it is free like Android. More importantly, as the number of users and the number of developers continue to grow, Tango will be the entire AR/VR industry. Create a positive boost."
 How is the future development of AR/VR technologyRegarding the future development, Guo Xu and Liang Ying believe that Tango and AR/VR technology will enter every aspect of our daily life.
However, compared to VR, Liang Ying is more optimistic about AR technology. She said: "Compared to the pure virtual implementation of VR, I am more optimistic about the way AR is connected to the real world because it is closer to our real life. One day we will not feel that we are using it. AR, but actually AR has provided us with services."
Guo Xu believes that as a new information carrier, AR/VR technology will become a standard everywhere in the future like GPS positioning. He said: "In the case of Tango, it can solve some real-world measurement issues, visualization problems, and indoor navigation problems that were previously impossible to achieve on traditional mobile phones. It is as if you can't imagine a cell phone without a calculator. In the same way, when Tango enters millions of millions of users in the future, it is very likely that in the future, you cannot imagine that a mobile phone can't even measure, and I can know the actual height of an object by two points on the mobile phone. No one will use it every day, but it is a must."
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