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Artificial Intelligence

Google’s New AI Tool Can Clean Your Room—Virtually—And So Much More

It can also fly a drone and tell the difference between a couch and a cushion, which is actually huge.
Screencap via YouTube

With its array of graphics identifying potential threats and targets, it's hard to forget the scene in Terminator when you see Sarah Connor from the T-800's POV. Now, a new demo of Google's Project Tango shows how close the tech giant is to making computer vision that good.

A video posted by Google human-computer interaction researcher Johnny Lee demonstrates software that can create a 3D map an entire room with a few swipes of a smartphone camera, identifying different objects in the room so accurately it can believably remove any one of them from view. On the slightly more terrifying side, a moment in the demo called "Orientation Invariant People Detection" looks just like the Terminator targeting scene, while another application shows how it keeps quadcopter drones from bumping into things.

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There are already two phones that implement Tango technology, according to the Google website, so whether it's used to edit reality, or tell flying robot invaders where to shoot, it's here.

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