Google announces Project Tango, a smartphone that can map the world around it

Google has built a prototype Android smartphone
that can learn and map the world around it. The
device comes from a new initiative called Project
Tango, and it's ready to get the phone into
developers' hands to see what the technology is
capable of. Google says that the phone will learn
the dimension of rooms and spaces just by being
moved around inside of them — walking around
your bedroom, for example, would help the phone
learn the shape of your home. The hope is that
by creating a robust map of the world, Google's
phone could eventually give precise directions to
any given point that needs to be reached.
It's an ambitious project, but that should be no
surprise given who it's coming from: Tango
comes out of the Advanced Technology and
Projects group — one of the few pieces of
Motorola that Google has opted to hang on to
rather than sell. "The goal of Project Tango is to
give mobile devices a human-scale
understanding of space and motion," says
Johnny Lee, leader of Project Tango. Google has
200 devices that it's preparing to give out to
developers who want to build mapping tools,
games, and new algorithms that take advantage
of the phone's sensors, and it expects to send
them all out by March 14th.
The Tango devices work by using a motion
tracking camera and a depth sensor built into
their backsides. While being moved around, the
sensors will detect their orientation and what's in
front of them, using that data to build out a 3D
map of their surroundings. While the basic goal is
to create detailed indoor maps, Google's
distribution of developer devices speaks to the
other possibilities it sees coming out of this type
of data: it suggests that Tango could be used to
create more realistic augmented reality games or
to assist the visually impaired when they're
navigating an unfamiliar area.
Google stresses that the technology is still in
early stages, but it still sees it as on the way to
reaching millions of people down the road. And
now, the Advanced Technology and Projects group
will have plenty of time and resources to make
that happen. Alongside the announcement of
Tango, Android chief Sundar Pichai extended a
welcome to the team, suggesting that they've
now fully fallen underneath Google. The group is
also responsible for Project Ara, which hopes
to build modular smartphones .
Project Tango appears to be a natural fit for
Lee's leadership. Lee's name may be familiar
from his work creating virtual reality tools out of
a Wii remote while at Carnegie Mellon, and later
for helping Microsoft develop the Kinect. He joined
Google in 2011 , and clearly he's still been
working on equally ambitious motion-tracking
projects since then. Google says it did not create
Tango all on its own, however, but with
assistance from various universities and research
institutions as well. The project has been in the
works at the Advanced Technologies group for the
past year.