By Harry McCracken

哈里·麦克拉肯(Harry McCracken)

In 2015, Dan Kaufman, the director of the information innovation office at the U.S. Department’s fabled DARPA lab, began talking to Google about joining the company in some capacity. Maybe he could work on Android. Or take a job at X, the Alphabet moonshot factory formerly known as Google X. And then another possibility came up: ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects), a Google research skunkworks that was “just like DARPA, but in Silicon Valley,” as he describes it. His reaction: “That sounds awesome!”

2015年，美国部著名的DARPA实验室信息创新办公室主任Dan Kaufman开始与Google讨论以某种身份加入该公司。 也许他可以在Android上工作。 或在X，Alphabet月球工厂的前身Google X工作，然后出现另一种可能性：ATAP(高级技术和项目)，这是Google的研究臭鼬工厂，“就像DARPA，但在硅谷”，他描述了它。 他的React是：“听起来真棒！”

At the time, ATAP was even led by Regina Dugan, Kaufman’s former boss at DARPA. But not long after he arrived as Dugan’s deputy, she abruptly left to start a similar group at Facebook.

当时，ATAP甚至由考夫曼在DARPA的前老板里贾纳·杜根(Regina Dugan)领导。 但在他担任杜根的代表不久后，她突然离开，在Facebook成立了一个类似的小组。

“She laughed and sort of threw the keys to me on the way out,” he remembers. “And I was like, ‘Holy cow, I now run this place.’”

他记得：“她笑了，在出门时把钥匙扔给了我。” “我当时想，'圣牛，我现在经营这个地方。'”

Kaufman, whose background also includes time at DreamWorks and in venture capital, has headed ATAP ever since. If that comes as news to you, it’s understandable — he has kept a public profile so low as to border on invisibility. When we met at the organization’s Mountain View office — which we did before the COVID-19 shutdown — he told me that the last interview he granted was back in 2015, when he was still at DARPA and spoke with 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl.

考夫曼(Kaufman)的背景还包括在DreamFactory(DreamWorks)和风险投资中的时间，从那时起一直领导ATAP。 如果这对您来说是个新闻，那是可以理解的-他的公开身份太低，以至于看不见。 当我们在该组织的山景办公室开会时(这是在COVID-19关闭之前进行的)，他告诉我，他所给予的最后一次采访是在2015年，当时他还在DARPA并与60分钟的 Lesley Stahl进行了交谈。

演示地址

This quietude has been a shift from ATAP’s early days. Dugan was a regular on the tech-conference circuit, bending minds by waxing futuristic about ideas like a password-authentication device you could swallow. The lab also talked freely about works in progress such as Project Ara, a wildly ambitious plan to build low-cost, Lego-like modular smartphones. (I wrote about it in 2014; Google ended up killing it in 2016.)

这是ATAP早期的转变。 杜根(Dugan)是技术会议的常客，通过对诸如密码验证设备之类可能会吞咽的想法的未来主义打蜡，来改变思想。 实验室还自由地谈论了正在进行的工作，例如Project Ara，这是一项雄心勃勃的计划，旨在建造低成本，类似Lego的模块化智能手机。 (我在2014年写过这篇文章； Google最终在2016年将其杀死了 。)

Now Kaufman is ready to open up a bit about ATAP’s current work. That includes some technologies that have already made their way to market — such as Soli, the radar-based gesture-detecting feature in the Pixel 4 smartphone — but also research investigations that might be a long way from consumerization, if they make it there at all.

现在，考夫曼准备好公开一点有关ATAP当前的工作。 其中包括一些已经推向市场的技术，例如Soli，Pixel 4智能手机中基于雷达的手势检测功能，而且还包括研究调查，如果将它们转化为消费类产品，可能还有很长的路要走所有。

Though ATAP has changed quite a bit from its early days, its ambitions remain expansive. Adopting the bass tones of movie-trailer narrator Don LaFontaine for emphasis, Kaufman recounts the pitch he gave other high muckety-mucks when discussing potential efforts: “I say, ‘Imagine a world in which this thing existed. I want you to forget all your objections. Just go on a fantasy with me. If I could build this, would you want it?’”

尽管ATAP从成立之初就发生了很大的变化，但其野心仍然很大。 考夫曼采用了电影预告片解说员唐·拉方丹 ( Don LaFontaine)的低音调，强调了他在讨论潜在努力时给予其他高mu头的声音：“我说，' 想象一下存在这个东西的世界。 我要你忘记所有反对意见。 只是和我一起幻想。 如果我能建造这个，你想要吗？'”

“If I can’t get a ‘yes,’ then it’s probably not that good of an idea,” he says. “If I get a ‘yeah, that’d be great, but how are you going to do that?’ . . . . That’s why we’re here.”

他说：“如果我不能接受，那可能不是一个好主意。” “如果我得到'是的，那太好了，但是你打算怎么做？' 。 。 。 。 这就是为什么我们在这里。”

在新的管理下 (Under New Management)

As initially conceived, ATAP focused on mobile technology — an artifact of its origins within Motorola during the brief period when Google owned the venerable phone maker. In 2014, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo. But it held onto ATAP — not a huge shock given the group’s focus on cutting-edge research.

最初构想时，ATAP专注于移动技术-在Google拥有这家古老手机制造商的短暂时期内，它起源于摩托罗拉。 2014年，谷歌将摩托罗拉卖给了联想。 但是，它紧紧抓住了ATAP-考虑到该小组专注于前沿研究，这并没有太大的震惊。

Another new dynamic came into play two years later, when Google formed a unified hardware group with responsibility for products such as Pixel phones and Home speakers (and, later, the Nest smart home portfolio). ATAP became part of this operation, which is headed by former Motorola executive Rick Osterloh.

两年后，Google成立了一个统一的硬件小组，负责Pixel手机和家庭扬声器(以及后来的Nest智能家庭产品)等产品，这是另一种新动力。 ATAP成为该行动的一部分，该行动由摩托罗拉前高管Rick Osterloh领导。

All of this change called for a new ATAP mandate more in line with Google’s overarching game plan for hardware. “When I came here, I thought there were a lot of really, really interesting projects,” says Kaufman. “It was just cool stuff. But there wasn’t really a cohesive vision or strategy. And I think if you want to have impact at a company like Google, you need to have a bit more focus. There’s that great [Wayne] Gretzky quote — ’don’t go to where the puck is, go to where the puck is going to be.’ If I wanted to influence Google, then I had to be really, really tightly aligned with Rick Osterloh’s vision, and how he sees things.”

所有这些更改都要求新的ATAP指令，使其更符合Google的总体硬件游戏计划。 “当我来到这里时，我认为有很多非常非常有趣的项目，”考夫曼说。 “这只是很酷的东西。 但是，实际上并没有凝聚力的愿景或策略。 我想，如果您想对像Google这样的公司产生影响，就需要更加集中精力。 [韦恩]格雷茨基(Wayne)Gretzky有个很棒的报价-“不要去冰球的地方，去冰球的地方。” 如果我想影响Google，那么我必须与Rick Osterloh的愿景以及他对事物的看法保持紧密的联系。”

To Kaufman and his ATAP colleagues, it was pretty clear where the puck was going. Some, he says, call it ambient computing; others either the fourth or fifth wave of computing. Whatever the name, they’re talking about the post-PC, post-smartphone world where devices of all kinds sport sensors and at least a modicum of their own intelligence, and cloud computing ties everything together.

对于考夫曼和他的ATAP同事来说，很清楚冰球的去向。 他说，有人称它为环境计算。 其他的则是第四波或第五波计算。 无论是什么名字，他们都在谈论后PC，后智能手机的世界，在这里，各种设备都具有传感器功能，并且至少具有自己的智能功能，而云计算则将一切紧密联系在一起。

None of that was a revelation. Nor did it automatically provide boundaries that would guide ATAP in a unique direction. “The mission that we got excited about,” says Kaufman, was “could we make Google hardware as helpful as Google software?”

这些都不是启示。 它也不会自动提供边界来引导ATAP朝着独特的方向发展。 考夫曼说：“我们激动的任务是，“我们可以使Google硬件像Google软件一样有用吗？”

For Google software such as Google Maps, Gmail, and its eponymous search engine, the contours of helpfulness are well established. Hardware is much more of a green field. Kaufman gives an example: Using a Home speaker in the kitchen to set a timer to remind you to turn down the oven. That’s useful. But if the timer announces its completion when you’re in another room, isn’t it no more helpful than a plain old kitchen timer? And maybe true helpfulness involves anticipating that you want to turn down the oven, so your cookies don’t burn? Regardless of whether ATAP is actually tackling the scourge of burnt cookies, it’s asking itself similarly open-ended questions about the areas it’s investigating.

对于诸如Google Maps，Gmail及其同名搜索引擎之类的Google软件，可以很好地确定有用性的轮廓。 硬件更多是绿色领域。 考夫曼举了一个例子：在厨房中使用家用扬声器设置计时器以提醒您调低烤箱的温度。 这很有用。 但是，如果计时器在另一个房间里宣布完成，那么它是否比普通的老式厨房计时器有用吗？ 也许真正的帮助包括预期您要关闭烤箱，这样饼干才不会燃烧？ 不管ATAP是否真正解决了烧饼的祸害，它都在询问有关其调查领域的类似开放式问题。

Along with tweaking ATAP’s research areas, Kaufman has also rethought how the group goes about conducting its work. The original DARPA-inspired vision was that no research effort would last for more than a couple of years. If it died along the way, that was perfectly fine. And if it thrived, it would get spun out into a real business run by product people rather than researchers.

除了调整ATAP的研究领域外，考夫曼还重新考虑了该小组如何开展工作。 DARPA最初的愿景是，研究工作不会持续超过两年。 如果它一路死了，那很好。 而且，如果它蓬勃发展，它将被分解成由产品人员而不是研究人员管理的真实业务。

The relatively small number of projects that ATAP has publicized don’t add up to a rousing endorsement for this approach. At the end of two years, the Ara modular phone was still an experiment, not a business; it never got into the hands of the consumers in emerging markets it was designed for. And Tango, a technology for mapping real-world environments as 3D spaces, made it into shipping devices and then gave way to a different tech called ARCore.

ATAP公布的相对较少的项目并不能为这种方法加分。 两年结束时，Ara模块化电话仍是一项实验，而不是一项业务。 它从未被设计用于新兴市场的消费者手中。 Tango是一种用于将现实环境映射为3D空间的技术，将其用于运输设备中，然后让给了另一种称为ARCore的技术 。

Another ATAP technology, Jacquard — which turns fabric into a touch-sensitive surface so items such as jean jackets and backpacks can sport user interfaces — hasn’t been under such pressure. First publicly acknowledged at the Google I/O conference in 2015, it’s been in shipping products for a while. Most recently, in a collaboration between Google, Adidas, and EA, it’s powered a new smart insole for soccer enthusiasts that can convert real-world soccer kicks into rewards inside EA’s FIFA Mobile game.

提花的另一种ATAP技术-可以将织物转变为触敏表面，因此诸如牛仔夹克和背包之类的物品可以具有用户界面-并没有承受如此大的压力。 它在2015年的Google I / O大会上首次被公众认可，已经有一段时间了 。 最近，在Google，阿迪达斯和EA的合作下，该产品为足球爱好者提供了一种新型智能鞋垫 ，可以将现实世界中的踢足球转化为EA FIFA Mobile游戏中的奖励。

Jacquard remains a boutique technology. But even though Google is typically most enthusiastic about ideas with the potential to become everyday necessities for massive quantities of people, Kaufman says that there’s value in getting Jacquard out there in its current form. Slide decks and prototypes can only tell you so much about how real people will react to products they’ve bought.

提花仍然是一种精品技术。 但是，即使Google通常最热衷于可能将其成为大量人们日常必需品的想法，但考夫曼说，以目前的形式提花仍是有价值的。 滑板和原型只能告诉您很多有关真实的人对购买的产品有何React的信息。

“What we do is we ship, we actually go all the way to shipping, but in low quantities,” he says. “Because when you ship a product, you can start to really mitigate risks.” One example: In an interview, a bike courier who bought the Jacquard-enabled Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket said that she found its turn-by-turn navigation directions to be a tad annoying. Commuters, after all, generally know where they’re going. Google reworked the product based on her input, and learned a lesson that might help Jacquard along its way to broader impact.

他说：“我们要做的就是出货，实际上我们一直在进行出货，但是数量很少。” “因为在运送产品时，您就可以开始真正地减轻风险。” 一个例子：在一次采访中，一位自行车快递员买了具有提花功能的Levi's Commuter Trucker Jacket，说她发现转弯导航方向有点烦人。 毕竟，通勤者通常知道他们要去哪里。 Google根据她的意见对产品进行了重新设计，并吸取了教训，这可能有助于提花获得更大的影响。

缩小雷达到大小 (Shrinking Radar Down to Size)

The patience Google has shown with Jacquard isn’t a fluke. Rather than treating ATAP’s original system for rapid innovation as sacrosanct, Kaufman decided that it was an artificial construct, especially as ATAP got more serious about serving Google hardware’s overarching goals. Some ideas just need more than two years of research before they’re ripe for commercialization. “If you want to have real impact and build something really meaningful at a scale that Google’s going to do, four or five years is not surprising,” he explains.

Google对Jacquard表现出的耐心并不是偶然。 考夫曼没有将ATAP的快速创新原始系统视为神圣不可侵犯的东西，而是认为这是人为构造，尤其是当ATAP更加认真地致力于服务于Google硬件的总体目标时。 有些想法需要超过两年的研究才能成熟，才能实现商业化。 “如果你想拥有真正的影响，并建立一些在规模，谷歌会做真正有意义，四五年也就不足为奇了，”他解释说。

This less-rushed approach is also visible in Soli, a technology which debuted last October in Google’s Pixel 4 smartphone. First previewed in 2015 — and then only after it was well into development — Soli powers a Pixel feature called Motion Sense that the phone uses for several purposes. It allows you to dismiss phone calls by waving your hand or control music with a contactless swipe, for instance. Motion Sense can also detect if someone is near the phone or reaching out to grab it. That way, it can shut off the Pixel’s “always-on” display if nobody’s there to see it, and prepare to unlock via face recognition even while you’re still lifting the phone.

去年10月在Google的Pixel 4智能手机中首次亮相的技术Soli中也可以看到这种不那么匆忙的方法。 Soli 在2015年进行了首次预览，然后才进行了很好的开发。随后，Soli支持了称为Motion Sense的Pixel功能，该功能可将手机用于多种用途。 例如，它允许您通过挥手或通过非接触式轻扫控制音乐来消除电话。 Motion Sense还可以检测有人是否在电话附近或伸出手来抓住它。 这样，如果没有人看到它，它可以关闭Pixel的“ always-on”显示屏，并且即使您仍在提起手机，也可以通过面部识别进行解锁。

Soli can also control games. And Google is encouraging third-party developers to come up with new applications for it.

Soli还可以控制游戏。 Google 鼓励第三方开发人员为其提供新的应用程序。

From Samsung’s “Air View” feature to the Leap Motion controller, various approaches to interacting with a screen without touching it have been around for years. But ATAP director of engineering Ivan Poupyrev and head of design Leo Giusti — who spearhead Jacquard as well as Soli — took a fresh look at the challenge of interpreting such gestures. The goal was to create something that was intuitive, power-efficient, capable of working in the dark, and (by not using a camera) privacy-minded. The enabling technology they settled on: radar.

从三星的“ Air View”功能到Leap Motion控制器 ，与屏幕交互而不触摸屏幕的各种方法已经存在了很多年。 但是ATAP工程总监Ivan Poupyrev和设计负责人Leo Giusti(提花和Soli的带头人)重新诠释了这种手势的挑战。 目标是创建一种直观，省电，能够在黑暗中工作并且(不使用相机)具有隐私意识的产品。 他们决定采用的促成技术：雷达。

If Google had required Soli to prove its worth in two years, it might never have emerged from the lab. It was “a little insane to say we are going to put radar — 60 gigahertz radar! — onto a chip,” Kaufman says. And even if ATAP did manage the feat, that was a long way from being able to suss out specific gestures being made by a human being.

如果Google要求Soli在两年内证明其价值，那么它可能永远不会出现在实验室中。 “说我们要装雷达-60 GHz的雷达有点疯狂！ —芯片上。”考夫曼说。 而且即使ATAP确实做到了这一壮举，距离能够怀疑人类做出的特定手势还有很长的路要走。

“We spent the first years exploring this new material that is the electromagnetic spectrum,” says Giusti. “We really didn’t think about use cases at the very beginning. So it’s kind of different from a normal product development cycle. This was truly research and development.”

“我们花了头几年的时间来探索这种新材料，即电磁波谱，” Giusti说。 “我们一开始确实没有考虑用例。 因此，它与正常的产品开发周期有所不同。 这是真正的研发。”

Once the Soli team was ready to consider specific real-world scenarios, it envisioned using Soli in smartwatches, where screens are dinky and traditional touch input can be tough to pull off. “We just needed a target,” says Poupyrev. “And we focused a lot on small gestures and fine finger motions, just to [be] super aggressive.” Eventually, the researchers began experimenting with the technology’s possibilities in smartphones — though at first, the requisite technology ate up so much internal space that an early prototype had no room for a camera.

一旦Soli团队准备考虑特定的现实世界场景，就可以设想在智能手表中使用Soli，因为智能手表的屏幕很笨拙，传统的触摸输入很难实现。 “我们只需要一个目标，” Poupyrev说。 “而且我们非常注重小手势和精细的手指运动，只是为了(变得)超级进取。” 最终，研究人员开始在智能手机中尝试该技术的可能性，尽管起初，必需的技术占用了太多的内部空间，以至于早期的原型没有相机的空间。

After multiple iterations, ATAP had a Soli chip that looks tiny even when sitting next to a pushpin. That’s what went into the Pixel 4 to enable its Motion Sense features.

经过多次迭代，ATAP的Soli芯片即使坐在图钉旁边也看起来很小。 这就是Pixel 4启用其运动感应功能的原因。

As part of the Pixel 4, Soli has received mixed reviews, ranging from “Soli is great for the Pixel 4” to “In a smartphone . . . Soli makes zero sense.” With Google reportedly disappointed by the phone’s sales, Soli isn’t the first example of an ATAP invention triumphantly becoming a major selling point for a hit product. Still, being part of a Google flagship phone was a far bigger vote of confidence than if it had arrived in something more inherently niche-y such as Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro, the first phone to incorporate ATAP’s Tango space-mapping technology.

作为Pixel 4的一部分，Soli收到了好坏参半的评价，从“ Soli非常适合Pixel 4 ”到“ 在智能手机中”。 。 。 索利的意义是零 。” 据说Google 对手机的销售感到失望，因此 Soli并不是ATAP发明成功成为热门产品的主要卖点的第一个例子。 尽管如此，作为Google旗舰手机的一部分，它的信任度要比它具有天生的利基性(例如联想的Phab 2 Pro)高得多 ， 联想是第一款采用ATAP的Tango空间映射技术的手机。

If Soli shows up in future Google devices in a more refined form, we’ll know that Google is serious about giving ATAP’s innovations every chance to succeed.

如果Soli以更精致的形式出现在未来的Google设备中，我们将知道Google会认真考虑为ATAP的创新提供每一次成功的机会。

笔，而不是笔形的计算机 (A Pen, Not a Pen-Shaped Computer)

ATAP technical project lead Alex Kauffmann (no relation to Dan Kaufman) has been at Google for almost a decade. Back in 2014, he was one of the creators of Cardboard, which uses a smartphone as the brains of a dirt-cheap VR headset. Now at ATAP, he’s still thinking about how to build devices that are useful without being overcomplicated pieces of technology. The name for this category within ATAP: direct objects.

ATAP技术项目负责人Alex Kauffmann(与Dan Kaufman无关)已经在Google工作了近十年。 早在2014年，他就是Cardboard的创建者之一，后者使用智能手机作为廉价VR耳机的大脑。 现在在ATAP，他仍在思考如何构建有用的设备而不会使技术过于复杂。 ATAP中此类别的名称：直接对象。

Kauffmann says that many companies that aspire to rethink existing products do so by essentially turning them into special-purpose computers. ATAP’s more Google-esque approach involves nudging more of the intelligence into the cloud, so familiar items can preserve more of their familiarity.

考夫曼说，许多渴望重新思考现有产品的公司都通过将其本质上转变为专用计算机来做到这一点。 ATAP更具Google风格的方法涉及将更多情报引入云中，因此熟悉的项目可以保留更多的熟悉度。

“I don’t want like, a computer shaped like a pen, or a computer shaped like a car,” he declares. “I just want a car, and I want the car to be smart. It’s like, can you take a regular everyday object and give it access to smarts? Because I don’t think you have to put the smarts in it.”

他宣称：“我不想要像笔一样的计算机或像汽车一样的计算机。” “我只想要一辆汽车，而且我想让汽车变得聪明。 就像，您能否带走日常的日常用品并让其使用智能设备？ 因为我认为您不必在其中加入智慧。”

The reference to pens is not just by way of example. When I visit with Kauffmann, he’s at work on one — and he definitely doesn’t want anyone to mistake it for a computer. “I’m not competing with some sort of $200 Parker fancy pen,” he says, brandishing a Paper Mate ballpoint from his desk. “I’m competing with this.”

对笔的引用不仅仅是作为示例。 当我与Kauffmann一起访问时，他正在从事一项工作-他绝对不希望任何人将其误认为计算机。 他说：“我没有与200美元的派克花式笔竞争。”他在办公桌上挥舞着Paper Mate的圆珠笔。 “我正在与此竞争。”

Smart pens are a venerable category of gadget, with the most prominent example being those long offered by Livescribe. But Livescribe’s intelligence is dependent on you using special paper with tiny dots printed on it, which lets the pen track your motions as you write and thereby turn your scrawls into digital ink.

智能笔是一种古老的小工具，最著名的例子是Livescribe长期提供的那些。 但是Livescribe的智能取决于您使用上面印有小点的特殊纸张，它使笔可以在书写时跟踪您的动作，从而将草稿变成数字墨水。

Though Livescribe attracted a cult following, the special paper always felt like an obstacle in the way of mass acceptance. Then again, a smart pen will only be interesting to the masses if it performs useful tasks that a 40¢ Paper Mate can’t.

尽管Livescribe引起了狂热的追随者，但这份特殊论文始终被认为是大众接受方式的障碍。 再说一次，只有当智能笔执行40美分Paper Mate不能执行的有用任务时，它才会引起大众的兴趣。

In the form I saw, Kauffmann’s prototype — which hasn’t yet undergone a miniaturization effort — is a bulbous contraption that looks more like a Popsicle than a pen. But it can already digitize writing without the use of special paper or other technological workarounds. And it works well enough for Kauffmann to explore its possibilities as a new interface for existing Google technologies. You can circle words to convert them into editable text, using the company’s handwriting-recognition engine. Or do math problems and have Google supply the answer. Or write in one language for translation into another.

按照我所看到的形式，考夫曼的原型(尚未进行小型化)是球茎状的装置，看起来更像冰棒而不是笔。 但是，它可以在不使用特殊纸张或其他技术解决方案的情况下，数字化写作。 对于Kauffmann来说，它运作得很好，足以探索其作为现有Google技术的新界面的可能性。 您可以使用公司的手写识别引擎圈出单词，将其转换为可编辑的文本。 或做数学题，让Google提供答案。 或用一种语言写成另一种语言。

Then there’s the AI-infused software toy called Quick, Draw. Unveiled by Google in 2016, it asks you to doodle common items — such as a baseball or ambulance. It then has its algorithm guess what you’ve drawn, based on its crowdsourced data from all the other doodlers who have tried the service. Having plugged his pen into this service, Kauffmann invites me to try it out.

然后是注入了AI的软件玩具，称为Quick，Draw 。 它于2016年由Google推出，它要求您涂鸦一些常见的物品，例如棒球或救护车。 然后，它会根据所有尝试过该服务的所有Doodle者的众包数据，根据自己的算法来猜测您绘制的内容。 将笔插入这项服务后，考夫曼邀请我尝试一下。

演示地址

When I sketch a cat, the Quick, Draw algorithm thinks it’s a kangaroo — possibly because it’s whiskerless and standing up. The software’s confusion is not that big a deal. At this point, Kauffmann’s pen is as much about starting conversations as anything else.

当我画猫时，“快速绘图”算法认为它是袋鼠-可能是因为它没有须须并且站了起来。 该软件的混乱并不重要。 在这一点上，考夫曼的笔头与开始对话一样重要。

He explains his approach to early prototypes: “I show it in a really rough stage, and if people sort of lean in and they get excited about a particular thing, that’s the thing I’ll dig into. And then I’ll try to understand the insight behind that? Is there a thing? Is it the translation? Is it the transcription? What part of this interaction is the part that’s really juicy? And I steer the research that way.”

他解释了他对早期原型的处理方法：“我在一个非常艰难的阶段对其进行了展示，如果人们精益求精，并且对某件事感到兴奋，那就是我要研究的事情。 然后，我将尝试了解其背后的见解？ 有事吗 是翻译吗？ 是转录吗？ 互动的哪一部分真正多汁？ 我就是这样指导研究的。”

“嘿，我怎么得到你的？” 舞蹈 (The ‘Hey, How Do I Get It to You?’ Dance)

Another one of Alex Kauffmann’s works in progress involves quick transfers of information — from one device, such as a smartphone, to another. He demos it to me by choosing a map location on a test phone, hovering that phone over another one I’m holding, and then “dropping” the location onto my device. The goal, he says, is to eliminate the “‘Hey, how do I get it to you?’ dance” that people often go through when trying to share stuff.

亚历克斯·考夫曼(Alex Kauffmann)正在进行的另一项工作涉及信息的快速传输-从一种设备(例如智能手机)到另一种设备。 他通过在测试电话上选择一个地图位置，将其悬停在我所持的另一个电话上，然后将该位置“拖放”到我的设备上，将其演示给我。 他说，目标是消除“'嘿，我怎么把它交给你？” 人们在分享内容时经常会经历的“跳舞”。

That aspiration isn’t new or unique to ATAP. Actually, it goes back at least as far as the 1990s, when Palm Pilot owners would “beam” contact info to each other via infrared ports. Today, Bluetooth-based features such as Apple’s Airdrop serve a similar purpose. Kauffmann’s take on the idea aims to be simpler and more reliable; the only enabling features it requires are a speaker, a microphone, and an internet connection. It doesn’t require devices to be paired or logged in to any particular account, and is designed to work on iPhones as well as Pixels and other Android phones.

这种渴望并不是ATAP的新事物或独特之处。 实际上，它至少可以追溯到1990年代，那时Palm Pilot的所有者将通过红外线端口“联系”彼此的联系信息 。 如今，基于蓝牙的功能(例如Apple的Airdrop)起到了类似的作用。 考夫曼(Kauffmann)的想法是要变得更简单，更可靠。 它唯一需要的启用功能是扬声器，麦克风和互联网连接。 它不需要将设备配对或登录到任何特定帐户，并且可以在iPhone以及Pixels和其他Android手机上使用。

The technology that makes it work has taken a circuitous route through Google. Back when Bluetooth Low Energy was new, some engineers tried to use the technology to design a digital tape measure. When they found Bluetooth lacking for the purpose, one of them switched to using sound waves to measure distances. The noise his electronics generated annoyed nearby coworkers, which led to the use of silent, ultrasonic tech. And even though the tape-measure project didn’t go anywhere, it eventually morphed into the idea of using ultrasonic audio to transfer data from one device to another.

使它起作用的技术已通过Google绕过了route回的路线。 早在蓝牙低能耗技术问世时，一些工程师就试图使用该技术来设计数字卷尺。 当他们发现缺少蓝牙的目的时，其中之一切换到使用声波来测量距离。 他的电子设备发出的噪音使附近的同事烦恼，从而导致使用了无声的超声波技术。 即使卷尺项目一事无成，它最终演变为使用超声音频将数据从一台设备传输到另一台设备的想法。

If anyone starts comparing what Kauffmann is working on to Bluetooth — or even thinking about it as technology — it will have failed to reach the level of ease he’s shooting for. “With the proliferation of lots of devices, you have this baffling panoply of protocols and other things that normally you wouldn’t expect the end users to know anything about, like the fact that everybody knows what Bluetooth is,” he says. “It’s kind of amazing, because you don’t know the name of the protocol that runs your lights.”

如果有人开始将考夫曼正在研究的技术与蓝牙进行比较，甚至将其视为技术，那么它将无法达到他所追求的轻松程度。 他说：“随着大量设备的泛滥，您会遇到令人困惑的协议和其他事情，通常您不会期望最终用户了解任何事情，例如每个人都知道蓝牙是什么。” “这真是太神奇了，因为您不知道运行灯的协议的名称。”

When might Kauffmann’s technology be available to consumers, and in what form? He tells me that he isn’t sure, and that it depends in part on his success selling it to other stakeholders within Google. “I’m in the unenviable position of having developed the tech, and now I have to convince every single part of Google that it makes sense to integrate it,” he says. “And to do it in a way that doesn’t require a login, and that doesn’t use personal information, and that actually maintains the vision.”

考夫曼的技术何时可以以什么形式提供给消费者？ 他告诉我，他不确定，这部分取决于他是否成功将其出售给Google内部的其他利益相关者。 他说：“我开发这项技术的地位令人羡慕，现在我必须说服Google的每个部分将其集成是有意义的。” “并且以不需要登录，不使用个人信息并且实际上保持愿景的方式来做到这一点。”

In a way, the fact that Kauffmann must make such a pitch — even in the new era of a more deeply embedded ATAP — is reassuring. Better that brainstorms be forced to run a gauntlet of internal skepticism than be shoved out the door before they’re ready.

从某种意义上说，即使在更深入地嵌入ATAP的新时代，考夫曼也必须做出这样的决定令人放心。 最好是在集思广益之前强迫内心怀疑，而不是在准备好之前将其推开。

房屋用鼠标 (A Mouse for Your House)

ATAP chief Kaufman is waxing nostalgic about the early reaction to the mouse as a PC input device. “I still remember having this conversation: Everybody who was a computer person thought [mice] were stupid,” he says. But the mouse didn’t cater to those who were already efficiently accomplishing tasks purely through jabbing at a keyboard. Instead, it unlocked the power of computing for the vastly larger number of people who didn’t think like programmers.

ATAP的负责人考夫曼(Kaufman)怀旧怀念早期作为PC输入设备对鼠标的React。 他说：“我仍然记得有一次谈话：每个计算机人都认为[小鼠]是愚蠢的 。” 但是鼠标并不能满足那些仅通过敲击键盘就能有效完成任务的人。 相反，它为不像程序员那样思考的绝大多数人释放了计算能力。

Today, for all the success in recent years of gadgetry such as Amazon’s Echo speakers, Sonos sound systems, and Google’s own Nest products, making the elements of a smart home work together can still feel like programming. Which leads to a project jokingly referred to inside ATAP as the “house mouse.”

如今，尽管近年来在小工具上取得了所有成功，例如亚马逊的Echo扬声器，Sonos音响系统和Google自己的Nest产品，但使智能家居的各个要素协同工作仍然像编程一样。 这就引出了一个在ATAP内部被戏称为“家用鼠标”的项目。

Along with the house mouse’s spiritual debt to Doug Engelbart’s rodent-like pointing device, it’s a radical rethinking of the remote control — a gizmo that, in its conventional form, has barely matured since the days when we didn’t use one for much other than switching on a TV, surfing through channels, and adjusting the volume. Spearheading the project is technical project lead Rick Marks, who joined ATAP in 2018, after 19 years as part of Sony’s PlayStation team, where his handiwork included forward-thinking efforts such as the PlayStation virtual-reality platform.

除了家鼠对道格·恩格尔巴特(Doug Engelbart)的啮齿类指针设备的精神欠缺之外 ，它还对遥控器进行了彻底的重新思考-自从我们不再使用其他设备的那一天以来，这种传统形式的小发明几乎还没有成熟。而不是打开电视，通过频道浏览和调节音量。 该项目的负责人是技术项目负责人Rick Marks，他在索尼PlayStation团队工作了19年后于2018年加入ATAP，他的工作包括具有前瞻性的工作，例如PlayStation虚拟现实平台 。

“When you first got a VCR back in the day, you could program it, but nobody did,” he says. “It’s the same thing with smart stuff. A lot of things you can do right now, but it’s just a little bit of a pain.” His research is devoted to new experiences that might help consumers take better advantage of the devices they own.

他说：“当您第一次获得VCR时，就可以对其进行编程，但是没有人做。” “聪明的东西是同一回事。 您现在可以做很多事情，但这有点痛苦。” 他的研究致力于提供新的体验，可以帮助消费者更好地利用他们拥有的设备。

Google, Amazon, and other companies have already invested overwhelming intellectual capital in letting people interact with smart home devices through voice control. “Voice is really great for a lot of things,” says Marks. “But it’s missing the kind of key things that a mouse brought to computers — spatial input and easy selection and things like that. So I’ve been working on trying to bring that kind of thing into the ambient computing world.” He mentions another source of inspiration: Star Trek’s Tricorder.

谷歌，亚马逊和其他公司已经投入了压倒性的智力资本，以使人们可以通过语音控制与智能家居设备进行交互。 Marks说：“语音在很多方面确实很棒。” “但是它缺少了鼠标带给计算机的那种关键东西—空间输入和易于选择之类的东西。 因此，我一直在努力将这种事情带入环境计算领域。” 他提到了另一个灵感来源：《 星际迷航》的《 三部曲》 。

With MacGyver-like aplomb, Marks started by cobbling together a working version of his futuristic remote using off-the-shelf parts. The gizmo’s brains are provided by a Palm — the undersize, Android-powered phone designed to help people wean themselves off a giant, addictive smartphone. Marks lashed the Palm to a hand controller from a Vive VR system, whose sensors give the remote its ability to understand where you’re pointing it. “This is just a duct-tape version of the thing we’d like to eventually see,” he explains. (Indeed, since he showed it to me, he’s created a version using ATAP-built technology.)

有了类似MacGyver的忠诚度，Marks开始使用现成的零件将他的未来派遥控器的工作版本拼凑在一起。 Gizmo的大脑由Palm提供， Palm是一款Android手机，尺寸偏小，旨在帮助人们摆脱庞大且令人上瘾的智能手机。 Marks将Palm绑在Vive VR系统的手持控制器上，该传感器的传感器使遥控器能够了解您的指向位置。 他解释说：“这只是我们最终希望看到的东西的胶带式版本。” (实际上，由于他向我展示了它，所以他使用ATAP内置技术创建了一个版本。)

Using items set up around his desk, Marks shows off his concept. He points his remote at a lamp to turn it on. Then he performs more complex maneuvers, including dragging the Star Wars theme from YouTube on his computer to the speaker where he’d like to hear it, and then to the lamp, which begins pulsating through different colors in a rhythm determined by the music.

Marks使用桌子周围摆放的物品展示了他的概念。 他将遥控器对准一盏灯将其打开。 然后，他执行更复杂的操作，包括将“星球大战”主题从计算机上的YouTube拖到他想听的扬声器上，然后拖到灯上，灯开始以音乐确定的节奏在不同的颜色中脉动。

Google’s Lens image-recognition technology is also part of Marks’s toolkit, powering a feature that lets you point the remote’s camera at a CD and then virtually drag its contents to a speaker for listening. (“It only works with Mötley Crüe right now,” he apologizes.)

Google的Lens图像识别技术也是Marks工具包的一部分，其功能强大，可让您将遥控器的相机对准CD，然后将其内容虚拟拖动到扬声器上进行收听。 (“这仅适用于MötleyCrüe，”他道歉。)

演示地址

When I ask about the use of Lens, Dan Kaufman — who has been hovering and observing Marks’s demo — points out the power of being able to piggyback on the technology rather than attempt to build something similar within ATAP. The Lens engineers “are my friends,” he says. They’re 10 minutes away, and they’ve got a ton of people. Same thing with the [Google] Assistant.”

当我问及使用镜头时，一直徘徊并观察Marks演示的Dan Kaufman指出，能够背负这项技术而不是尝试在ATAP中构建类似的东西的力量。 他说，镜头工程师“是我的朋友”。 他们只有10分钟的路程，他们有很多人。 [Google]助手也一样。”

Which brings up a question: How many Googlers are in the employ of ATAP itself? The company declines to provide a figure, saying that it has a policy against disclosing team sizes. But it doesn’t appear to be an enormous number, at least in comparison to the overall headcount in Google’s hardware group. (In 2018, when the company acquired most of HTC’s smartphone operations, it added 2,000 engineers just in that one transaction.)

这就提出了一个问题：ATAP本身雇用了多少Google员工？ 该公司拒绝提供数字，称其有一项政策禁止透露团队规模。 但这似乎不是一个庞大的数字，至少与Google硬件部门的整体员工人数相比。 (在2018年，当公司收购HTC的大部分智能手机业务时 ，仅在那笔交易中就增加了2,000名工程师。)

For what it’s worth, Kaufman argues that the headcount that matters most isn’t ATAP’s own. “There’s that quote everyone uses — I always butcher it,” he says. “‘If you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to get travel far, travel together.’ I don’t care how many smart engineers we hire. If I can tap into 100,000 Googlers, that just feels like a really good idea.” He adds that one of his most critical responsibilities is exploring all the opportunities for collaboration — not just with other parts of Google but also far-flung Alphabet siblings such as Verily and Waymo.

就其价值而言，考夫曼认为最重要的员工人数不是ATAP自己的。 他说：“ 每个人都有这样的名言 -我总是屠杀它。” “'如果您想快速旅行，请独自旅行。 如果想远行，那就一起旅行。 我不在乎我们雇用了多少精明的工程师。 如果我可以接触100,000个Google员工，那真是个好主意。” 他补充说，他最重要的职责之一就是探索所有合作机会-不仅与Google的其他部门合作，还与Verily和Waymo等遥远的Alphabet兄弟姐妹合作 。

More than seven years after ATAP began teasing its first research projects, it’s hardly a startup within Google. But even if its history to date is short on world-changing breakthroughs, its brainpower remains formidable. Its increasing integration with other parts of the company makes sense. And if it succeeds at imbuing Google hardware with the kind of smarts the company’s software has always had, Google’s patience with the whole idea will look . . . well, smart.

在ATAP开始进行首个研究项目超过7年之后，它几乎不是Google的初创公司。 但是，即使迄今为止其历史尚不足以改变世界，但其脑力仍然强大。 它与公司其他部门的日益集成是有道理的。 而且，如果它成功地向Google硬件注入了该公司软件一直具有的那种智慧，那么Google对整个想法的耐心将会显现。 。 。 好吧，聪明。