Despite a detailed plan put forward at I/O this May, Reuters is reporting that Google is shelving plans to directly make and release a Project Ara device. While the technology could be licensed and released with other partners, Ara no longer fits into Google’s broader hardware strategy.
Google gave us a rare update on Project Ara almost exactly a week ago, showing off the latest prototype of the device and giving us an update on when we should expect it to launch. The company said that a new Project Ara development kit is coming this fall, and that the consumer modular phone is scheduled to launch next year. While those promises may or may not prove to have weight, it’s still good to see the company making some steps forward.
And now Dave Hakkens, the creator of Phonebloks (the project that first inspired Project Ara and other modular phones), has come out with his two cents on the latest Ara update…
At Google I/O 2016, the Mountain View company decided — although admittedly not an entirely new theme — that it would be a good idea to spread its announcements across three days. The keynote showed off Google’s vision for the future: virtual reality, its new AI and machine learning initiatives, Google Home hardware to take advantage of them, and a few sprinkles of Android Wear 2.0 goodness. The second day saw the announcement of the Play Store coming to Chrome OS.
But the third day was ATAP day, admittedly my favorite day of Google I/O. Last year the Advanced Technologies and Projects group at Google showed off Project Jacquard, Project Soli, some more details on Project Ara, and more. And then the company went silent. For pretty much an entire year.
Maybe that’s a good thing, as Google tends to show its projects and technologies off a little early in general. It’s not exactly out of Google’s character to show a product or service, say that it’s coming in 6 months, it not arrive for 12 months or 18 months, and then the final product share hardly any resemblance to what was originally announced. Admittedly that’s happening with some of ATAP’s projects either way (I’m looking at you, Ara), but at least it’s not a constant barrage of teases and false hope.
Anyway, Google ATAP finally came out of hiding on the third day of I/O yesterday, and with it came updates on Project Jacquard, Project Soli, Project Ara, and Spotlight Stories. Jacquard brought the announcement of the first retail product based on the tech, Ara brought a little update on how progress is coming including the most current prototype device with new module connectors (and promise of a dev kit coming soon), and the Spotlight Stories mention came with some progress in VR storytelling. All cool stuff.
But Soli is what makes my jaw drop.
After a long wait, Project Ara is now closer to real product with a consumer product finally coming next year. In addition to a new developer kit launching this year, ATAP announced many partnerships with companies to make modules. Google believes that Ara will be the future of computing and is now its own division.
Following the first Project Jacquard consumer product, ATAP is making a smartwatch with Project Soli built-in. Soli is a gesture recognition technology based on radar that can sense fine hand movements.
At last year’s Google I/O, the Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP) announced several interesting projects. Since then, ATAP head Regina Dugan departed for Facebook and the group was moved under Google’s new hardware division. This year, Project Jacquard — sensors embedded in fabrics — is announcing its first consumer product with Levi’s…
Google I/O is right around the corner, and this year’s a bit different. Google’s holding the event closer to home — at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. And everything’s happening outside in the cool breeze of the Bay Area. This is different scenery than the last several years that have at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, and we’re hoping that this means the event itself is going to have some fresh scenery as well.
Among many other things, this year looks like it’s going to be heavy on virtual reality, with a little bit of Android N, Chrome OS, Project Tango, ATAP, and messaging sprinkled in for good measure…
A recent Lenovo reshuffle saw long time Motorola head Rick Osterloh leave Motorola. Now, Google (via Re/Code) has confirmed that it just hired Osterloh to lead a new hardware division that encompasses such product lines as Nexus, ATAP, and even Google Glass…
In a surprising hire, Facebook has poached ATAP head Regina Dugan from Google (via The Verge). The Advanced Technologies and Projects group originated at Motorola, but was integrated into Google before the Lenovo sale. Dugan will have a similar role at Facebook leading a new hardware group called Building 8.
It’s a little over two years since Motorola launched Spotlight Player, an app that could be used to view a 360-degree interactive animation. Initially limited to the Moto X before being rolled out to other Android devices, you move your smartphone up, down, left and right to choose which part of the scene to view – and can also view through Google Cardboard.
Google held onto the team when it sold Motorola to Lenovo, and it has now launched Special Delivery, a holiday-themed Spotlight Story from Aardman Animations, the creators of Wallace & Gromit. While you have to pay for some stories, this one is free as a holiday gift from Google …
Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group has been on a tear at I/O these past two days, demoing lots of new and interesting innovations that may one day hit production and make all of our lives much, much better. One of such projects is Project Abacus, which is seeking to all but eliminate the use of passwords for authentication.
Put simply, our smartphones can collect a lot of information about how we go about our day – how fast we walk, how well we type using our phone’s keyboard, how we talk – and the ATAP group thinks that using this data for authentication is 10x safer than fingerprints, and 100x safer than 4 digit PIN codes. They think that because, well, they’ve gathered lots of data on it – the company has been running trials of Project Abacus since last year in partnership with 33 universities and in total has collected 40 terabytes of data across 28 different states. They did not, however, say how much more secure they are than old-fashioned email and password combinations.
While Abacus runs in the background on your phone and collects data about you, it is constantly calculating a trust score that is basically a score of how confident it is that you are who you say you are, the owner of the phone. When you launch an app, take Netflix, if Abacus can successfully verify your identity, you’ll be logged in automatically. If it is unable to get a high trust score for you, Abacus will revert back to asking for a password. ATAP also says that different apps could theoretically require different trust scores – a banking app would most certainly want a higher trust score than that of a game.
Project Abacus doesn’t totally eliminate passwords but it’s one step closer, and makes total elimination of them a logical conclusion. And anything that will further mitigate the risk of intruders accessing my digital life is fine by me. When the world is putting this much energy into obfuscating away old-fashioned passwords (don’t forget Smart Lock Passwords) you know their time is up. A world that runs on these highly secure trust scores is on the horizon, I can feel it.
ATAP’s Project Soli and Project Jacquard are two of the more exciting announcements to come out of Google I/O, and while Soli didn’t have any impressive demos on the show floor, Google’s advanced technology and projects group had some touch-able fabric out for us to give Project Jacquard a test run. So we did, and we grabbed a quick video…
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Update: They’re official.
We’re at Google I/O 2015, and just made our way to the press lounge. On the way up, we stopped by the ATAP booth and snapped some spy pictures leading up to the keynote. Apparently, ATAP is working on a couple of new projects: Soli and Jacquard. Let’s see what we can find out before they’re officially announced in the coming hours…
Google has announced that Project Tango, the 3D mapping tech currently formerly in development in the company’s Advanced Technology and Projects division is moving on to a home of its own.
The Google+ post announcing the change didn’t provide specifics about where exactly the Tango tech will be moving, but it seems the company is pleased with the progress it’s made so far and is willing to invest some additional resources to continue the work.
The second developer conference for Google’s Project Ara is happening today, and the ATAP team took some time this morning to show the world the second iteration of the modular smartphone—dubbed Spiral 2. While the hardware for the updated prototype is said to be complete at this point, the firmware still needs a bit work, as mentioned on stage by ATAP’s Paul Eremenko. But that aside, this new version continues to usher in the Project Ara mentality that consumers should be free to use hardware (much like we use software) to build a phone based on their needs—not the needs a company has determined they likely have.
Project Ara is still slowly but surely making its way toward being a commercial product, and today one of the mysteries of the device–how people will buy and sell various interchangeable hardware modules–has been answered. Globant, a company focused on delivering “innovative software” has announced that they’ve partnered with Google’s Advanced Technology & Projects (ATAP) group on the development of a marketplace made specifically for Project Ara.
Back at Google I/O, Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects team showed off the first booting prototype Project Ara device and teased that the first units would be available to developers later this year. Today, Google announced that 100 members of its Ara Scouts program will soon be the recipients of the first Project Ara devices. In a post announcing the closure of the Ara Scouts program, Google said that the lucky 100 people were chosen based on how often they participated in the Scouts program.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q1JzJadgHY]
Ahead of the first Ara Development Conference on 15 & 16 April, Google has released a teaser video showing a few glimpses into the project to create a phone with swappable modules, allowing customers to configure a phone to order and update individual components at a later date …
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Project Ara, the modular phone project announced by Motorola’s ATAP team last year, will be getting its own developer conference this April. Google announced the event on the Project Ara website (via AndroidPolice) and noted that a live stream with “interactive Q&A capability” will be available online for those that can’t attend. The conference will take place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and Google says there will be a limited number of attendees. The event will focus heavily on a new Ara Module Developers’ Kit that will be released online in early April:
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