 At Google I.O. 2014, we saw some of the craziest and the most beautiful stuff that Google is currently working on. It's coming out of the Advanced Technologies and Products Group. It's a team led by Regina Dugan, and she's a legitimate badass. This is ATAP. Dugan's presentation at I.O. is essentially a grand introduction for ATAP to the world. She told us who ATAP is and how they work. For the next 45 minutes, you're going to get a glimpse of a small band of pirates trying to do epic shit. Here we don't tinker. We build new things. The cool shit that ATAP is building is sometimes hard to describe. These aren't the traditional consumer product prototypes you're used to. The first thing it showed us was Project Tango. Technical lead Johnny Lee showed us the all-seeing tablet that's able to see in 3D and know where it is in space. It's called Spatial Awareness, and it might help blind people move around and video game developers create amazing new stuff. The best demo that we saw was of the tablet moving around five floors of Google's campus with only 1% of drift over the entire trip, all mapped with just cameras and motion sensors, not GPS. Oh, and then there's soldiers attacking bathtubs and real-time portal puzzles. Next up was Paul Aramanko and Project Ara. It's a modular smartphone that should be arriving for developers this fall, and it's coming along. For the first time, we saw a real Ara phone boot up live. Then we saw it freeze. But the working phone should be arriving later, and when it does, we might have some pretty crazy modules for it. Why can't I slide in a module that's my key fob? Then take it out, give it to a valet. Why not share the most expensive sensor or component among my friends, my family, or perhaps across a village? If you don't want a new battery, you can hot swap a regular battery module to essentially get any battery life that you want. Last but certainly not least, we got an update on Spotlight Story, the neat little animated virtual reality scenes that you might have seen on the Moto X. ATAP is working on a new one called Duet. Even better, they're working with animator Glenn Keen, who's worked on everything from Ariel to Tarzan for Disney. For Google, his drawings were painstakingly converted into CGI using gigabytes and gigabytes of data and then combined to make another virtual reality play. Basically, ATAP has got a bunch of people who used to work at DARPA inside the Defense Department, and they're all about trying crazy stuff that nobody else believes is possible. The craziest part of all is that they're actually pulling it off.