Google’s Project Tango

Google’s Project Tango

project-tango-first-look-390x208The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion.

Project Tango is the outcome of Google team working with universities, research labs, and industrial partners spanning nine countries around the world to harvest research from the last decade of work in robotics and computer vision, concentrating that technology into a unique mobile phone.

Google’s Project Tango, a smartphone equipped with a variety of cameras and vision sensors that provides a whole new perspective on the world around it.

The current prototype is a 5” phone containing customized hardware and software designed to track the full 3D motion of the device, while simultaneously creating a map of the environment. These sensors allow the phone to make over a quarter million 3D measurements every second, updating its position and orientation in real-time, combining that data into a single 3D model of the space around you.

Image Courtesy: Google

Image Courtesy: Google

It runs Android and includes development APIs to provide position, orientation, and depth data to standard Android applications written in Java, C/C++, as well as the Unity Game Engine. These early prototypes, algorithms, and APIs are still in active development. So, these experimental devices are intended only for the adventurous and are not a final shipping product.

The phone is equipped with a standard 4-megapixel camera paired with a special combination RGB and IR sensor and a lower-resolution image-tracking camera. Those image sensors give the smartphone a similar perspective on the world as you and I, complete with spatial awareness and a perception of depth. They feed data to Movidius’ custom Myriad 1 low-power computer-vision processor, which can then crunch the data and feed it to apps through a set of APIs.

 These devices were built with the unique ability to sense 3D motion and geometry.

Source: Google’s Project Tango

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