Get your app featured on the first smartphone with Project Tango from Lenovo

Posted by Johnny Lee, Technical Project Lead, Project Tango

Today, at CES, Lenovo announced the development of the first consumer-ready smartphone with Project Tango. By adding a few extra sensors and some computer vision software, Project Tango transforms your smartphone into a magic lens that lets you place digital information on your physical world.

*Renderings only. Not the official Lenovo device.

To support the continued growth of the ecosystem, we’re also inviting developers from around the world to submit their ideas for gaming and utility apps created using Project Tango. We’ll pick the best ideas and provide funding and engineering support to help bring them to life, as part of the app incubator. Even better, the finished apps will be featured on Lenovo’s upcoming device. The submission period closes on February 15, 2016.

All you need to do is tell us about your idea and explain how Project Tango technologies will enable new experiences. Additionally, we’ll ask you to include the following materials:

• Project schedule including milestones for development –– we’ll reach out to the selected developers by March 15, 2016
• Visual mockups of your idea including concept art
• Smartphone app screenshots and videos, such as captured app footage
• Appropriate narrative including storyboards, etc.
• Breakdown of your team and its members
• One pager introducing your past app portfolio and your company profile

For some inspiration, Lowes Home Improvement teamed with developer Elementals Web to demonstrate a use case they are each working on for the launch. In the app, you can point your Project Tango-enabled smartphone at your kitchen to see where a new refrigerator or dishwasher might fit virtually.

Elsewhere, developer Schell Games let’s you play virtual Jenga on any surface with friends. But this time, there is no cleanup involved when the blocks topple over.

There are also some amazing featured apps for Project Tango on Google Play. You can pick up your own Project Tango Tablet Development Kit here to brainstorm new fun and immersive experiences that use the space around you. Apply now!

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Learn about Google Translate in Coffee with a Googler

Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate

Over the past few months, we’ve been bringing you Coffee with a Googler, giving you a peek at people working on cool stuff that you might find inspirational and useful. Starting with this week’s episode, we’re going to accompany each video with a short post for more details, while also helping you make the most of the tech highlighted in the video.

This week we meet with MacDuff Hughes from the Google Translate team. Google Translate uses statistics based translation. By finding very large numbers of examples of translations from one language to another, it uses statistics to see how various phrases are treated, so it can make reasonable estimates at the correct phrases that are natural sounding in the target language. For common phrases, there are many candidate translations, so the engine converts them within the context of the passage that the phrase is in. Images can also be translated. When you point your mobile device at printed text and it will translate to the preferred for you.

Translate is adding languages all the time, and part of its mission is to serve languages that are less frequently used such as Gaelic, Welsh or Maori, in the same manner as the more commonly used ones, such as English, Spanish and French. To this end, Translate supports more than 90 languages. In the quest to constantly improve translation, the technology provides a way for the community to validate translations, and this is particularly used by less commonly used translations, effectively helping them to grow and thrive. It also enhances the machine translation by having people involved too.

You can learn more about Google Translate, and the translate app here.

Developers have a couple of options to use translate:

• The Free Website Translate plugin that you can add to your site and have translations available immediately.
• The Cloud-based Translate API that you can use to build apps or sites that have translation in them.

Watch the episode here:

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Samsung Pen Package – Some Fundamentals

This is in continuation from my previous post. Samsung’s latest devices (Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the Galaxy Note 10.1 (2014 edition) tablet) are unique with the introduction of the S Pen. The focus of the Samsung SmartApp Challenge that is currently open expects developers to use the pen and the look packages that are part of the Samsung Mobile SDK briefed in my earlier two posts.

In this post I would like to dive a bit deeper on the pen package and in a subsequent post on the look package. We will see what are they, as we go along.

S Pen is opening up a new horizon to Smartphones that support it. In fact I would not be surprised if Samsung soon open sources this project for encouraging wider adoption.

First, what is an S Pen?

Note that S Pen is an innovative stylus-type input device that comes with the Galaxy Note range of devices. It seems to have started off with the idea of making drawing or writing easy on smartphone where a finger touch doesn’t provide a great experience. It is not a capacitive stylus that typically phones came with but uses the Wacom’s EMR (Electro-Magnetic Resonance) patented Technology. For more on the technology behind the S Pen, you can read this article on the XDA Developers Forum or the ‘Android Authority’ post.

The tip of an S Pen allows for its usage in apps that need sensitivity to pressure applied and precision. The side buttons provide for press and release events based on which actions can be initiated.

In order to support developers to build apps for the S Pen, a pen package has been introduced as part of the Samsung Mobile SDK.

Next, what is the Pen package?

It is a package that allows developers to write applications that can take hand-written inputs. It allows the use of a pen, finger or any other kind of input tools or virtual pens to aid precise user input in the most natural way possible. It feels like you are actually writing or drawing on the device and would you call that a luxury? I am sure it is an understatement for thos who use their devices extensively for all day to day activities. J

The pen packageenables to

• ·      Draw using a pen/finger
• ·      Change user preferences for pens, erasers and text
• ·      Edit and save the inputs
• ·      Undo or redo thus managing history of inputs
• ·      Support both touch and hover events

A few words about the architecture of the pen package before we look at snippets of program using the package: