Every few months, Google seems to unveil some hare-brained scheme. These schemes range from
floating internet-supplying balloons over developing countries to
putting magical glasses on the faces of normal people.
Project Tango isn’t as earth-changing as the internet balloons idea, but it does have enormous potential. It could change the way you use your Android phone and transform the way you look at the world around you.
What is Project Tango?
Project Tango is a smartphone that senses the world around you using sensors. It’s like Kinect and a smartphone all rolled into one. The project is currently in prototype form at Google headquarters and installed on a 5-inch smartphone.
Who is making Project Tango?
Google hires the most talented techies from around the world. For Project Tango, they’ve enlisted the help of ex-Microsoft employee and current Google employee Johnny Lee. Lee helped Microsoft make the first Kinect device.
What will Project Tango do?
What’s the point of having Kinect-like sensors on your smartphone? Google wants its users to get a “human-scale understanding” of the space around themselves and to map their environments in ways they’ve never before been able to do.
The current prototype doesn’t actually feature any ridiculously advanced technologies. Instead, it relies on sensors that you probably already have in your smartphone, including a gyroscope, camera, depth sensor, and motion tracking camera.
The secret to Project Tango is the software platform that connects all of these sensors together to construct a virtual environment based on the world around you.
Here are some amazing things that Project Tango could help us achieve:
-Virtual reality gaming in the immediate area around you
-Amazing potential with Oculus Rift
-Ability to help blind people and the visually impaired navigate more easily
-Architecture and interior design
-Real-time mapping wherever you go
When will Project Tango be released?
Project Tango will likely be unveiled further at Google’s I/O event in June 2014. However, Google wants to ship 200 prototype units to talented developments before the end of March 2014.
Project Tango wouldn’t just change the mobile world. It would change the
world world. Like many of Google’s technologies and plans, Tango is wildly ambitious. But if it comes to fruition, it’s going to be a world-changing technology that could appear on smartphones within the next decade. That’s pretty cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe10ExwzCqk
Oh, and before you look at the calendar and check if this is one of Google’s infamous April Fool’s Day jokes, it’s not: I already checked.
