Imagine you ’re part of a magnanimous trade name like Target . How do you convince customers you ’re nerveless ? If you ’re not hold off around for one of your employees tobecome a viral teen hearthrob , how about thrusting them into a practical reality humankind ? In thelatest instance of VR advertising , Google and Target have teamed up to let shoppers research a winter wonderland as they stride down the aisles .
It ’s all thanks toGoogle ’s three-D - sensing Project Tango tablets , which employ an telling combining of depth - sensing cameras and trackers to keep cart track of your stance as you take the air around . Is this a glance into the future of steel ? Is it cool ? I go to my local Sunnyvale Target computer memory to discover out .
Project Tango Hands - On : Computer Vision Is So Much Cooler Than You guess
Sure enough , anywhere you look — through the center of Tango — you see scenery right on out of a youngster ’ Christmas cartoon . elephantine confect canes , musical icicle , a snowman warming himself by the flack in an igloo . There ’s a strut animated cervid and an ice - skating bear who winds up frozen in a giant ice cube . you could hold snowball at a cartoony blue T - Rex at the end of the demo . It ’s cute .
But there ’s not a lot connecting the animated experience to the actual Target fund . Only the rough shape of the store aisles is visible in the wintertime scenery , and I found myself count through hard currency registers and shelf take with Cartesian product to see some of the slight touches that creative agency Stinkdigital total to the mankind . It ’s nice that the experience is n’t now trying to deal me things , but it ’s not help me grease one’s palms thing I need to buy either . If it were n’t for Target mascot Bullseye the dog tagging along , I ’d be wondering whether this had anything to do with Target at all .
Perhaps the magnanimous challenge is the limited orbit of Target and Google ’s demo . This Target - Tango demonstration is only available at four stores in the United States , and for only a few Clarence Day before it fare to a closing . you may only walk down three very specific aisles of the memory board : the tablet CRT screen frosts over and tells you to call on AROUND ! should you go out of bounds . Augmented reality has its borders .
Google and Stinkdigital reps told me it came down to the technical constraint of the current Project Tango setup . Using the Tango ’s camera and detector , the squad only necessitate a few 60 minutes at each Target storage to make a digital mapping of what the interior face like — so that subsequent Tango tablet could obtain their fashion around — but the tablet does n’t actually build the corresponding virtual world on the fly . Every inch had to be hand-crafted in the Unity game engine for each of those store aisles . It ’s the same as the common criticismof Google ’s self - driving cars : They only go places that have already been carefully map out out .
Still , Google has full ambitions for Project Tango than amusing shopper . In June , it show offa parallel undertaking with Walgreens and aisle411to help those shoppers in reality detect point on shelves . Google also articulate it ’s presently working with “ a XII high visibleness brand across numerous verticals ” to take vantage of Project Tango ’s ability , and hopes to unwrap more in the fountain . The hardware will finally be available for even consumers too . While the developer tablet costs $ 1024 and is currently out of livestock , LG has promised a consumer product that includes Project Tango sensors sometime next year .
If you want to check out Project Tango for yourself , there ’s still time if you survive in the right shoes : it ’s on show through Sunday at the Sunnyvale , CA and Chicago Near North stores , and Dec. 11 - 14 at the Dallas Cityplace Market Target in Texas , or the Roseville Target in Minnesota . Just do n’t expect to get any shopping done while you ’re doing it .
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