That might be neat if the module knows its position on the surface being tagged, and remembers what’s already been sprayed. Wave the phone across the surface like a color inkjet head, more and tighter waves where you want more detail.
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Permissions actually doesn’t work the way it intuitively sounds. It’s really poor wording on the part of Google.
Permissions very strictly Does Not give you permission to all the data collected by an app. It only gives you permission to use very particular pieces of data collected by that app that you have explicitly given Permission to use. Or permission to very particular functions of an app that the programmers have made available to other developers only if you give Permission to allow access.
It’s actually a really secure system. They just terribly need a technical writer to change the required standard verbiage of the prompt from “Do you give this new app you are installing permission to use the camera” to something more accurate and way less scary sounding.
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I wonder what PETA would think of this.
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They never fail to disappoint
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Do you think this project (the phone, not the module) ever actually had a chance in hell of shipping given the cell phone climate these days?
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You had me at “wriggling tardigrades”.
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See, this is why we shouldn’t take life so seriously. I always suspected our universe was just an attachment to some douchebag’s cellphone one level up.
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Oh, it definitely could have shipped if ATAP had held on for another six months. V1 wasn’t too far off from release. Whether it would have been a financial success is much harder to predict.
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I was just pondering, last night in the hot tub, the complete failure of open source OS’s on phones when I was thinking about laptops and the move to smaller screens. “Oh, I can run Linux fairly well on this laptop and kinda on this tablet but then I get to the phone and the failwhale arrives.” Not directly related to this device, especially via Google, but the overall space of interesting and open mobile communications, from hardware through software, and the lockin that so many of the vendors (hardware through software) have.
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I was interested to follow the ARA project as I’d done some customer research work for Vodafone a number of years ago. We prototyped some new functions for people using what was then called the Vodafone “embedded phone client”. This client was designed to run on stock hardware from various manufacturers and models. It essentially took over the phone and made it into a Vodafone jail (that some people hated).
We ran the tests using three different phones. The functionality under test was exactly the same for each hardware model though. We were surprised to find that the participants who appeared to like the functions most were always the ones using the cooler (newer) looking phone. This was an accident - we only had a few of those phones so had to supplement them with older models in some test locations.
After running tests in the UK and Italy with various demographics, we came to the conclusion that people who buy mobile phones were more interested in what the phone looked like than its specs or functions - by a wide margin. However, they were very good at pretending to make purchase choices around things like cameras or screen resolutions when probed. The effect was so notable that we re-designed later tests to confirm what we’d seen in the first runs.
I wonder if those who started the ARA project were fooled by the phenomenon we observed? That phones are like watches - you don’t buy one for the fact that it’s waterproof to 50m. It has to look cool.
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I feel Cory’s talk at CCC about the war on general purpose computing is pretty relevant, here. The ability to call a small computer with a built-in radio transceiver a phone has given it this important, distinctive place in peoples’ minds. We don’t tend to demand the brand of deep access to our phones’ systems we demand of our other computers. I think that gives vendors a huge opportunity to sell incredibly simple programs that do things as trivial as give you access to data your phone is already gathering (like the accelerometer for fitness tracking) and lots of motivation to keep it that way.
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They just needed more time to get the bugs out? 
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Sigh. True.
I make a joke that it isn’t a real operating system until I can check code into git.
I keep wishing the Canonical and Pals folks didn’t keep screwing up Ubuntu on tablets or other devices. I’d love to have the little phone that I plug into a bigger machine when I am at home and take with me otherwise that covers my entire space of needs as an engineering guy in tech.
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It could also be that the variety of hardware and formats you find in the phone world just defy the big, sloppy, hairy shape large collaborative software projects like open source OS’s take. From what I’ve seen, the hardware moves quickly, scrappy independent open phone projects are too poorly funded, and community projects are too stochastic to permit a successful open phone to crack the market.
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I’m not even concerned about the “market” per se. If they said “You all have to run one of the three models of phones but then you can run this cool OS for the next four years,” I might do it. Of course, then the physical tech just gets out of date. See all the secure phone projects built on top of Android and only specific devices right now.
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Just came across this image:
Whoa! Way back in the day, I was a big Maemo fan, but what on earth is happening here!
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Some of these can be bought right now. They interface through the earpiece socket.
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That is a thing:
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Ultrasound scanner? Geiger counter?
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