Google has announced 'Project Tango' today, a new prototype phone with 3D sensors.
The search giant says the phone can build "visual maps" of the rooms or areas you are in with advanced 3D scanning. Says the company:
200 lucky developers will be given reference units to being testing and working on, and you can apply for one at the Project Tango homepage.
The real world applications are numerous, and the technology in the device was previously too expensive and power intensive to be ever put in a phone. That does not appear to be a problem anymore.
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.
200 lucky developers will be given reference units to being testing and working on, and you can apply for one at the Project Tango homepage.
The real world applications are numerous, and the technology in the device was previously too expensive and power intensive to be ever put in a phone. That does not appear to be a problem anymore.
