Project Tango is a Google technology platform that uses computer vision to enable mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to detect their position relative to the world around them without using GPS or other external signals. This allows application developers to create user experiences that include indoor navigation, 3D mapping, measurement of physical spaces, recognition of known environments, augmented reality, and windows into virtual 3D worlds.
Project Tango was developed by a team led by computer scientist Johnny Lee, a core contributor to Microsoft’s Kinect.
Google has produced two devices to demonstrate the Project Tango technology: the Peanut phone (no longer available) and the Yellowstone 7-inch tablet. More than 3,000 of these devices had been sold as of June 2015,chiefly to researchers and software developers interested in building applications for the platform. In the summer of 2015, Qualcomm and Intel both announced that they are developing Project Tango reference devices as models for device manufacturers who use their mobile chipsets.
The software with synchronization with camera works by integrating three types of functionality:
- Motion-tracking : using visual features of the environment, in combination with accelerometer and gyroscope data, to closely track the device’s movements in space
- Area learning : storing environment data in a map that can be re-used later, shared with other Project Tango devices, and enhanced with metadata such as notes, instructions, or points of interest
- Depth perception : detecting distances, sizes, and surfaces in the environment
Together, these generate data about the device in “six degrees of freedom” (3 axes of orientation plus 3 axes of motion) and detailed three-dimensional information about the environment.
Applications on mobile devices use Project Tango’s C and Java APIs to access this data in real time. In addition, an API is also provided for integrating Project Tango with the Unity game engine; this enables the rapid conversion or creation of games that allow the user to interact and navigate in the game space by moving and rotating a Project Tango device in real space. These APIs are documented on the Google developer website.
Device : The Yellowstone tablet
- “Yellowstone” is a 7-inch tablet with full Project Tango functionality, released in June 2014, and sold as the Project Tango Tablet Development Kit.
- It features a 2.3 GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra K1 processor, 128GB flash memory, 1920×1200-pixel touchscreen, 4MP color camera, fisheye-lens (motion-tracking) camera, integrated depth sensing, and 4G LTE connectivity.
- The device is sold through the official Project Tango website and the Google Play Store.
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