GOOGLE TO TURN SMARTPHONES INTO 3D MAPPING DEVICES

          SAN FRANCISCO: Google has announced a new research project aimed at bringing 3D technology to smartphones, for potential applications such as indoor mapping, gaming and helping blind people navigate. its Project Tangowould provide prototypes of its new smartphone to outside developers to encourage the writing of new applications.  

     "What if you could capture the dimensions of your home simply by walking around with your phone before you went furniture shopping?" Google said on its Project Tango web page.

          "What if directions to a new location didn't stop at the street address? What if you never again found yourself lost in a new building? What if the visually impaired could navigate unassisted in unfamiliar indoor places? What if you could search for a product and see where the exact shelf is located in a super-store?" 

        The technology could also be used for "playing hide-and-seek in your house with your favourite game character, or transforming the hallways into a tree-lined path." 

Smartphones are equipped with sensors which make over 1.4 million measurements per second, updating the positon and rotation of the phone. 

Google working on 10 gbps internet connectiions

The Web giant is working on technology to deliver data transfer speeds over the Internet at 10 gigabits per second, 10 times faster than the connections offered by Google Fiber in Kansas City, a Google executive revealed Wednesday, according to a USA Today report. That's roughly 1,000 times faster than the average US connection speed of 7.2 megabits per second.

Of course, Google isn't alone in its quest for faster Internet connections. A team of UK researchers announced last year that they had achieved wireless data transmission speeds of 10Gbs via visible light. Their "Li-fi" system used a micro-LED light bulb to transmit 3.5Gbps across each of the three primary colors of visible light: red, blue, and green.