Google's Project Tango: A Brief History and Its Impact on Smartphones

Project Tango was an initiative by Google that aimed to enable smartphones to detect their exact position relative to the world around them. The company partnered with various manufacturers to integrate specialized sensors into their devices, allowing them to provide precise location data. This technology had the potential to revolutionize the field of augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI). However, the project ultimately failed to gain widespread adoption.

Google called Project Tango a "proof-of-concept" for AR technology, and it was intended to be used as a stepping stone towards more advanced AR capabilities. The company encouraged device manufacturers to adopt this technology by providing guidelines and certification programs for compatible devices. One of the few companies that actively pursued this initiative was Asus, which released the Zenfone Ar, one of the first phones to support Project Tango. Although the phone's design was sleek and feature-rich, it did not become a huge commercial success.

The failure of Project Tango can be attributed to Google's own realization that they could achieve similar results without the need for specialized sensors. The company subsequently developed AR Core, which became the standard for most modern smartphones. This shift in strategy left many Project Tango devices obsolete and limited their functionality. Despite this setback, Asus continued to innovate, releasing a follow-up model, the Zenfone 2, which featured improved self-healing capabilities.

The LG G Flex: A Revolutionary Design Philosophy

In 2013, LG released the G Flex, a smartphone that defied conventional design norms. The phone's curved shape was inspired by the natural curves of the human body, particularly the hands and face. This unorthodox approach to design aimed to provide a more comfortable user experience. The phone's back was made from a self-healing material called Healite, which had an atomic structure that could repair scratches and cracks.

The LG G Flex 2 took this technology a step further by refining the self-healing capabilities of its predecessor. The new device boasted improved scratch resistance and healing times, with some estimates suggesting it could recover in seconds. Although these innovations were promising, they ultimately failed to gain widespread adoption due to the rise of glass-based smartphone designs.

The LG G Flex 2: A Subtle yet Innovative Design

Compared to its predecessor, the LG G Flex 2 was a more subtle design iteration. While still maintaining the curved shape that set it apart from other smartphones, the new device seemed less pronounced and refined. The phone's size was also reduced, making it a more compact option for users.

In an attempt to showcase the self-healing capabilities of its material, LG included a scratch test in the packaging of the phone. When the device was subjected to a knife attack, the material appeared to repair itself, restoring its original appearance. However, this gimmick did not translate to widespread commercial success.

The Decline of Self-Healing Phones

Despite the potential benefits of self-healing materials, they never gained significant traction in the smartphone market. The primary reason for this was the widespread adoption of glass-based designs, which became the norm in the industry. Apple's early use of glass on its iPhones and Samsung's subsequent switch to this material type pressured other manufacturers to follow suit.

The rise of glass-based designs left self-healing phones with limited appeal, as they were no longer seen as a premium feature. LG, in particular, seemed to have reached a plateau with its innovations, failing to continue improving the technology beyond its initial potential. The decline of self-healing phones marked an interesting chapter in the evolution of smartphone design, highlighting the trade-offs between innovative materials and mainstream adoption.

Ideal Smartphone Finishes: A Subject of Personal Preference

When it comes to smartphone finishes, opinions are often subjective and varied. Some users prefer the premium feel of glass, while others appreciate the durability of metal or the eco-friendliness of plastic. Wood, a less common material used in smartphones, has gained popularity in recent years due to its unique aesthetic appeal.

The ideal smartphone finish ultimately depends on individual preferences and priorities. While some may value scratch resistance above all else, others might prioritize aesthetics or sustainability. As the smartphone market continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how manufacturers balance innovation with user expectations.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enoh no oh that's bad so i spent the last few months collecting six of some of the rarest wackiest smartphones you've ever seen and each of them has a very different vision of what the future's gonna be so number six is the moto z and you know how smartphones now are like eight nine millimeters like 7.5 on a really good day well this is 5.2 it's one of the thinnest smartphones in the world ever because it's easy to forget that just a few years ago that was the game that was what companies thought the future was oh my god i'm going to be honest with you holding this in my hands right now i get it like this doesn't even feel real it feels like something's missing it just so happens that for smartphones being thin stopped being cool go back seven years and every company was just out there trying to make every design slimmer than the last i remember the day when if a company released a phone that was thicker than their last model people would be like what are you doing they get booed off stage it would look like they were moving backwards so really it was just a matter of time before someone had durability problems and the iphone 6 and iphone 6 plus were those phones if you put enough pressure on the chassis they could be bent in half so almost overnight the appeal of thin phones vanished and so even though i am literally sitting here gorping at this phone by the time the moto z came out no one cared about thinness okay phone number two you know when i say the word foldable phone right now you probably think of the samsung galaxy z4 2 or the motorola razer but just a few years ago you would have thought of something closer to this the zte axon m was that he thought at the time was the future oh it's actually pretty nice packaging i guess as you'd expect given that this was one of the most expensive phones you could buy at the time and i will say that with this phone there were a lot of good decisions made these stickers not being one of them the dual screen meant that you could run two apps at the same time in full screen cool it could be used as a book with the bezel serving as a divider in the middle also cool plus like listen to this hinge ah so why didn't this take off well just like for current foldables in 2020 i think it's because people didn't really need it android in its entirety has been built around being able to do everything with just one normal size display and because of that up until this point foldables have just basically been hardware companies deciding that they want to build a foldable and then afterwards trying to find reasons why an average consumer might want one as opposed to there being an inherent problem that needs fixing they talked about how you can have two different videos playing at the same time but given that you can only listen to one of them at any one point how useful is that i guess like if you had two different sporting events that just so happened to be streamed at the same time and you only wanted to listen to one of them maybe but it's a bit of a stretch they showed off how you can use one screen to mirror what's happening on the other why would i want to mirror what's happening on one phone screen on another phone screen that's sitting right next to it so yeah while i do believe in foldables i really want to do that again until one comes out that either isn't noticeably more expensive than a normal phone or one that can actually solve a pain point that currently exists i don't think they'll fly and along a very similar line of dual screen devices this is the yota 3 plus it's the last phone ever made by the yota company who tried to take over the smartphone market by providing people with one normal display on the front and one e-ink on the back i kind of spectated this company for a while from a distance i never actually got the phones but i've been fascinated by them so it's kind of crazy though right now in front of us we have the most advanced model they ever created it's stunning packaging as well it looks like something you'd keep in a library it actually is a book wow that's such an interesting way to present something let's just see if there's anything else interesting in here it's pretty standard say what you will about the yota company but these guys had a vision these guys really believed in e-ink and i can see it i can see the power of it instead of using a traditional display for which each pixel needs to be individually and continuously lit the ink just basically pushes around these tiny little capsules of color into whatever formation needed and once they're in formation not a single watt of power is consumed and so if i drew something on an ink display i could leave it on there for a year and it would probably still be there when i came back plus as a side benefit you know normally your phone's display kind of fights with the sunlight the ink becomes more readable with sunlight imagine being able to do smartphone things like google maps navigation on a display that sips almost no power is tantalizing but do you know the problem with this idea it's the fact that it's android see with something like a kindle you can actually squeeze incredible battery life out of any ink display but android is a high power consumption operating system so even if you use your ink display which uses a fraction of the power of your normal one the rest of your phone which is like 70 of your power usage is still carrying on as normal your gps your data connection your background apps none of that stops so you can probably imagine that the battery saving the kind of main selling point of this whole concept was not as revolutionary as initially claimed and i've got a full video which actually talks about the mess that the yota company got into but for now you can see why the concept failed okay augmented reality you probably have noticed has been getting slightly better every year slowly becoming something that dare i say is actually useful well google had this exact vision back in 2014. they saw that ar was going to be huge and so they built an entire protocol to let companies build phones that were able to use it phones that were able to detect their exact position relative to the world around them google called it project tango they basically said companies look if you put these particular sensors on your phone in this particular way then you can be project tango certified and you'll be compatible with this upcoming world of ar and asus is one of the few companies that listened this is actually one of the two devices ever released to support project tango the zenfone ar so actually on the side you can see the project tango sticker there it's quite a rare one surprise screen protector oh it's actually a glass screen protector very fancy you can tell that asus you know really put some care and love into this like these are some nice looking earphones there's something else in here as well it's just a hard plastic case on the face of it the failure of project tango is confusing it was backed by google themselves you can see why it's useful and we use ar today if google already built this in 2014 then surely the ar we have today is based on that well no it's actually quite funny so shortly after coming out with project tango and telling developers to start adopting it into their phones google realized that they could actually do the same thing without those extra sensors and they ended up calling it ar core and that's what a lot of phones use today which as you can probably imagine is not good news for project tango phones i've been saving the best two till the end this is a phone right here that i've been wanting to unbox since i saw it get announced back in 2013. this is the lg g flex now unlike the name suggests it's not actually a flexible phone unfortunately but see it's curved this phone is a perfect example of how in 2013 smartphone makers they didn't have as much of a template as to how they needed to make their phone the concept is actually quite simple your hands your palms are curved your face is curved so let's build something that fits around it i could totally imagine lg sitting there in a boardroom scratching their heads thinking this might be what people want maybe let's try it oh yeah and the material lg ended up picking for the back of the phone heals itself it has an atomic arrangement such that it sits in a really stable equilibrium and if you disrupt that equilibrium slightly it can bring itself back into equilibrium in theory at least but let's try it i'm just going to give it a good old scratch with this knife it's a it's a very sharp blade don't want to do this it's a really rare phone okay i don't no oh that's bad okay take a look at that really quite a clear scratch i'm gonna give it a rub let's see what happens 12 seconds later i think the thing to take from this is that it's not amazing however what makes this better is the fact that we have a second phone the lg g flex 2. and the cool part about this is they basically took the self-healing capabilities of the first phone and supposedly made it better it could supposedly heal in seconds as opposed to minutes and just be able to heal more damage it's almost psychedelic looking packaging and you can see they've actually adopted the curve of the phone in the box itself that's that's a cool touch okey-dokey so we got the phone and nothing of interest so compared to the first model it's actually a lot smaller and just kind of generally subtler in design and the curve looks about the same in terms of how pronounced that is but more importantly let's give it a scratch okay so nice big old scratch on there i feel like i'm doing a magic trick okay well it feels it feels like it's lighter there is some improvement you can definitely see that the scratch seems less deep it would have been really interesting to see how much lg could have improved this with future generations let's say they made four or five more lg g flex phones the place it could be at now would actually be impressive so why did self-healing phones disappear because surely if they perfected that technique that sounds like a dream well it's because glass came apple had already used glass for quite some time on their phones but as soon as samsung made the switch with their galaxy s6's it kind of pushed all the reluctant android phone makers to follow suit they knew that they wouldn't be able to make a phone that felt as premium as samsung's by only relying on plastics and on that note i'd be curious what you think what would be your ideal smartphone finish plastic glass metal wood something else let me know anyway if you enjoyed this video and subs the channel would be amazing my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one youoh no oh that's bad so i spent the last few months collecting six of some of the rarest wackiest smartphones you've ever seen and each of them has a very different vision of what the future's gonna be so number six is the moto z and you know how smartphones now are like eight nine millimeters like 7.5 on a really good day well this is 5.2 it's one of the thinnest smartphones in the world ever because it's easy to forget that just a few years ago that was the game that was what companies thought the future was oh my god i'm going to be honest with you holding this in my hands right now i get it like this doesn't even feel real it feels like something's missing it just so happens that for smartphones being thin stopped being cool go back seven years and every company was just out there trying to make every design slimmer than the last i remember the day when if a company released a phone that was thicker than their last model people would be like what are you doing they get booed off stage it would look like they were moving backwards so really it was just a matter of time before someone had durability problems and the iphone 6 and iphone 6 plus were those phones if you put enough pressure on the chassis they could be bent in half so almost overnight the appeal of thin phones vanished and so even though i am literally sitting here gorping at this phone by the time the moto z came out no one cared about thinness okay phone number two you know when i say the word foldable phone right now you probably think of the samsung galaxy z4 2 or the motorola razer but just a few years ago you would have thought of something closer to this the zte axon m was that he thought at the time was the future oh it's actually pretty nice packaging i guess as you'd expect given that this was one of the most expensive phones you could buy at the time and i will say that with this phone there were a lot of good decisions made these stickers not being one of them the dual screen meant that you could run two apps at the same time in full screen cool it could be used as a book with the bezel serving as a divider in the middle also cool plus like listen to this hinge ah so why didn't this take off well just like for current foldables in 2020 i think it's because people didn't really need it android in its entirety has been built around being able to do everything with just one normal size display and because of that up until this point foldables have just basically been hardware companies deciding that they want to build a foldable and then afterwards trying to find reasons why an average consumer might want one as opposed to there being an inherent problem that needs fixing they talked about how you can have two different videos playing at the same time but given that you can only listen to one of them at any one point how useful is that i guess like if you had two different sporting events that just so happened to be streamed at the same time and you only wanted to listen to one of them maybe but it's a bit of a stretch they showed off how you can use one screen to mirror what's happening on the other why would i want to mirror what's happening on one phone screen on another phone screen that's sitting right next to it so yeah while i do believe in foldables i really want to do that again until one comes out that either isn't noticeably more expensive than a normal phone or one that can actually solve a pain point that currently exists i don't think they'll fly and along a very similar line of dual screen devices this is the yota 3 plus it's the last phone ever made by the yota company who tried to take over the smartphone market by providing people with one normal display on the front and one e-ink on the back i kind of spectated this company for a while from a distance i never actually got the phones but i've been fascinated by them so it's kind of crazy though right now in front of us we have the most advanced model they ever created it's stunning packaging as well it looks like something you'd keep in a library it actually is a book wow that's such an interesting way to present something let's just see if there's anything else interesting in here it's pretty standard say what you will about the yota company but these guys had a vision these guys really believed in e-ink and i can see it i can see the power of it instead of using a traditional display for which each pixel needs to be individually and continuously lit the ink just basically pushes around these tiny little capsules of color into whatever formation needed and once they're in formation not a single watt of power is consumed and so if i drew something on an ink display i could leave it on there for a year and it would probably still be there when i came back plus as a side benefit you know normally your phone's display kind of fights with the sunlight the ink becomes more readable with sunlight imagine being able to do smartphone things like google maps navigation on a display that sips almost no power is tantalizing but do you know the problem with this idea it's the fact that it's android see with something like a kindle you can actually squeeze incredible battery life out of any ink display but android is a high power consumption operating system so even if you use your ink display which uses a fraction of the power of your normal one the rest of your phone which is like 70 of your power usage is still carrying on as normal your gps your data connection your background apps none of that stops so you can probably imagine that the battery saving the kind of main selling point of this whole concept was not as revolutionary as initially claimed and i've got a full video which actually talks about the mess that the yota company got into but for now you can see why the concept failed okay augmented reality you probably have noticed has been getting slightly better every year slowly becoming something that dare i say is actually useful well google had this exact vision back in 2014. they saw that ar was going to be huge and so they built an entire protocol to let companies build phones that were able to use it phones that were able to detect their exact position relative to the world around them google called it project tango they basically said companies look if you put these particular sensors on your phone in this particular way then you can be project tango certified and you'll be compatible with this upcoming world of ar and asus is one of the few companies that listened this is actually one of the two devices ever released to support project tango the zenfone ar so actually on the side you can see the project tango sticker there it's quite a rare one surprise screen protector oh it's actually a glass screen protector very fancy you can tell that asus you know really put some care and love into this like these are some nice looking earphones there's something else in here as well it's just a hard plastic case on the face of it the failure of project tango is confusing it was backed by google themselves you can see why it's useful and we use ar today if google already built this in 2014 then surely the ar we have today is based on that well no it's actually quite funny so shortly after coming out with project tango and telling developers to start adopting it into their phones google realized that they could actually do the same thing without those extra sensors and they ended up calling it ar core and that's what a lot of phones use today which as you can probably imagine is not good news for project tango phones i've been saving the best two till the end this is a phone right here that i've been wanting to unbox since i saw it get announced back in 2013. this is the lg g flex now unlike the name suggests it's not actually a flexible phone unfortunately but see it's curved this phone is a perfect example of how in 2013 smartphone makers they didn't have as much of a template as to how they needed to make their phone the concept is actually quite simple your hands your palms are curved your face is curved so let's build something that fits around it i could totally imagine lg sitting there in a boardroom scratching their heads thinking this might be what people want maybe let's try it oh yeah and the material lg ended up picking for the back of the phone heals itself it has an atomic arrangement such that it sits in a really stable equilibrium and if you disrupt that equilibrium slightly it can bring itself back into equilibrium in theory at least but let's try it i'm just going to give it a good old scratch with this knife it's a it's a very sharp blade don't want to do this it's a really rare phone okay i don't no oh that's bad okay take a look at that really quite a clear scratch i'm gonna give it a rub let's see what happens 12 seconds later i think the thing to take from this is that it's not amazing however what makes this better is the fact that we have a second phone the lg g flex 2. and the cool part about this is they basically took the self-healing capabilities of the first phone and supposedly made it better it could supposedly heal in seconds as opposed to minutes and just be able to heal more damage it's almost psychedelic looking packaging and you can see they've actually adopted the curve of the phone in the box itself that's that's a cool touch okey-dokey so we got the phone and nothing of interest so compared to the first model it's actually a lot smaller and just kind of generally subtler in design and the curve looks about the same in terms of how pronounced that is but more importantly let's give it a scratch okay so nice big old scratch on there i feel like i'm doing a magic trick okay well it feels it feels like it's lighter there is some improvement you can definitely see that the scratch seems less deep it would have been really interesting to see how much lg could have improved this with future generations let's say they made four or five more lg g flex phones the place it could be at now would actually be impressive so why did self-healing phones disappear because surely if they perfected that technique that sounds like a dream well it's because glass came apple had already used glass for quite some time on their phones but as soon as samsung made the switch with their galaxy s6's it kind of pushed all the reluctant android phone makers to follow suit they knew that they wouldn't be able to make a phone that felt as premium as samsung's by only relying on plastics and on that note i'd be curious what you think what would be your ideal smartphone finish plastic glass metal wood something else let me know anyway if you enjoyed this video and subs the channel would be amazing my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one you\n"