Press Release: The future is awesome.
We can build it faster together.
As we walk through our daily lives, we use visual cues to navigate and
understand the world around us. We observe the size and shape of objects and
rooms, and we learn their position and layout almost effortlessly over time.
This awareness of space and motion is fundamental to the way we interact with
our environment and each other. We are physical beings that live in a 3D world.
Yet, our mobile devices assume that physical world ends at the boundaries of
the screen.
The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding
of space and motion.
Over the past year, our team has been 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. Now, we’re ready to
put early prototypes into the hands of developers that can imagine the
possibilities and help bring those ideas into reality.
We hope you will take this journey with us. We believe it will be one worth
traveling.
- Johnny Lee and the ATAP-Project Tango Team
What is it?
Our 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.
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.
What could I do with it?
What if you could capture the dimensions of your home simply by walking around
with your phone before you went furniture shopping? What if directions to a new
location didn’t stop at the street address? What if you never again found
yourself lost in a new building? What if the visually-impaired could navigate
unassisted in unfamiliar indoor places? What if you could search for a product
and see where the exact shelf is located in a super-store?
Imagine playing hide-and-seek in your house with your favorite game character,
or transforming the hallways into a tree-lined path. Imagine competing against
a friend for control over territories in your home with your own miniature
army, or hiding secret virtual treasures in physical places around the world?
To find out more, and
apply for a development kit visit http://g.co/ProjectTango.
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