 Hi, this is Dieter Bon with The Verge, and I'm in Sunnyvale, California at the offices for Project ARA. It's the moonshot project out of the Advanced Technologies and Products group inside Google, and they're trying to build modular smartphones that will let consumers swap out components on the fly. It sounds like a nerd's dream, but the real dream is to upend how we make and buy phones in the future. Project ARA isn't a phone. It's actually, well, a project. ATAP, a group that in some part came out of DARPA, is essentially just making the instructions for how modular phones work. They're developing the technology for the different pieces to talk to each other and working with partners to build prototypes. At the center of it all is an endoskeleton, an unassuming slab with different slots where you can put in modules. There's some wild technology inside this metal frame. ARA is using next-gen, super-fast networking technology to get all the parts to talk to each other. It manages power and lets you hot-swap modules. It uses wireless capacitive pads to let the modules communicate with the main board and each other. Even the way the modules lock into the frame is futuristic. In this lateral direction, they are held using electropermanent magnets, which is a pretty neat technology. It's kind of a cross between a permanent magnet and an electromagnet in that it has an on-state and an off-state. It uses an electrical pulse to switch between those two states, but it's a passive component, meaning it consumes no power in both the off-state and the on-state. But all that technology doesn't add up to a phone. It's essentially just networking. It doesn't have your main processor, your cellular radio, or even a screen. Adding all those things on piecemeal can make for a pretty bulky phone, but ATAP has managed to build something that doesn't look completely ridiculous. Trying to keep the form factor of a device to something that we think is elegant and beautiful where each individual module has this pebble-like, sleek, watertight aesthetic associated with it. And so as a consequence, because the form factor is defined by this, that leaves a little bit less area for functional components. Traditional phones put as many parts as possible on a single circuit board or even a single chip. Pulling all those things apart into separate modules has costs. The phone gets fatter, battery life drops, and overall the thing gets heavier. Aramenco thinks that he can convince people that the trade-offs are worth it. So we want to make sure that that overhead, that inefficiency is minimized. And we think the crossover point is somewhere at the one-third overhead point. We think we'll come in at about one-quarter, about 25% overhead. And by crossover, I mean that's where consumers are willing to trade some penalty in exchange for the flexibility and for the richness of the ecosystem and the ability to customize functionally and aesthetically. The aesthetics matter a lot. Even if Aramenco's ambitious plans work out, people still have to want to use the thing. To get there, ATAP is working with a partner to create a first-of-its-kind 3D printer, which will be able to rapidly build customized plastic shells for each module. What that means is that we'll be able to create module enclosures, which on any given module are user-replaceable. We call them shells. And so a consumer in the ARA marketplace will be able to utilize shell maker apps to create beautiful designs that are not just unique, not just custom, but can also be expressive to the consumer. This week, Aramenco and his team is finally getting into the nitty-gritty of how ARA will work by hosting a conference for hardware developers. The group has an aggressive goal of launching a real product for consumers about a year from now. So getting there won't be easy, and they'll need the support of both big and small manufacturers to do it. The more you think about Project ARA, the crazier and more ambitious it seems. Aramenco's ATAP group itself consists of just a handful of people. They're working with partners to build up prototypes and create the spec. They're also on an insanely tight schedule, and strangely enough, it's a schedule they've imposed on themselves. So the internal team, and in this case the team internal to Google, is very, very small, very, very lean. And we're here for a very short period of time. So I had a two-year tenure, and one year into my two-year tenure. The project is scoped to the team's tenure. And as a consequence, the philosophy is that time is not your friend, and innovation under time pressure is higher quality innovation. It tends to get rid of red tape, it tends to get rid of dithering and inability to make decisions, and it tends to take away risk aversion. So it's innovation under time pressure. ATAP came from a team of people who originally worked at DARPA, pursuing futuristic projects. Aramenco himself had plans for next generation war vehicles, and even something called fractionated spacecraft. But ATAP's philosophy is to aim high and demand that you make something real, something more than just a prototype, in only two years. So the ability to take a sort of fundamental scientific and technical understanding of groundbreaking physics and technology, and intersect that with a driving, very compelling, moonshot practical application. As a consequence, they culminate, they have to culminate in a demonstration. They can't just culminate in theory, or PowerPoint, or a lab demo. So the DARPA mantra is that we do demonstrations at a convincing scale. And what that means is that the demonstration has to retire all the key technical business and market risks. Demonstrations at convincing scale is a weird phrase, but it's an important one. It means that Project ARA has higher stakes than Google's other moonshot projects, like self-driving cars or internet blasting balloons. By this time next year, the ATAP group has to actually prove that ARA can work, it has to have a critical mass of module developers and potential consumers. In fact, they're targeting the five billion people who don't yet have a smartphone. If they can pull it off, it could be a huge deal. Hardware manufacturers won't have to try to convince giant phone makers to include their parts on big-name phones, they can just sell them directly to consumers. Consumers won't have to throw away their old phones when they want to upgrade. And the ATAP team, well, they're going to have to find another crazy problem to tackle. Project ARA will be handed off to Google, and Aramenco will be moving on to the next moonshot. Despite thisходит, Mummy will be receiving out-of-color