Saturday, December 16, 2017

3D Imaging News

ArsTechnica: Google announces that its AR project Tango with PMD ToF camera inside is officially shut down. ArsTechnica states the reasons for the discontinuation:

"Even with all the extra hardware, Tango's tracking was never that great. The constant drifting and other tracking errors made some of the coolest apps, like a measuring tape, unreliable for even small measurements. One amazing app, called "Matterport Scenes," turned the phone into a handheld 3D scanner, but the tracking errors meant your scans were never great at picking up detail. The app also absolutely crushed the Tango hardware and, after a few minutes of scanning things, would close with an out-of-memory error. Even games never really took off on the platform thanks to the low install base."


South China Morning Post reports that Chinese woman has been offered a refund after Apple Face ID allowed a colleague to unlock her iPhone X:


Meanwhile, a number of companies in China announce smartphones with Face Unlock: Vkworld S8, Vernee X and many others.

4 comments:

  1. This is yet another example showing that all the money in the world cannot buy you everything.
    Sometimes insights, innovation, drive, synergy, and resilience of small teams can beat the volumes of money and body count of large corporations.

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  2. This comment is a great insight by itself.

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  3. Obviously Google has a great lack of effective project management...
    -dkf

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  4. I believe that the companies like Google, Apple, and the like have the best project managers.
    The comensation level these companies are offering is way above industry average (talking about hardware, not software), and hence they can easily attract the top talent. To put it bluntly and matter-of-factly - it's all about the money (for most people).

    But doing innovation, and doing effective project management are two different, and very often - opposite things. The difference is like between risk aversion and risk taking.

    Corporations try to minimize their dependence on individuals' capabilities - and it is their strength and their weakness.
    They can roll out huge volumes of successful products.
    But when the disruption comes - they are often not able to adapt and change, and fail.
    Examples are numerous.

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