Guest Robert Nazarian Posted February 25, 2014 Posted February 25, 2014 Google announced Project Tango last week leaving us salivating for a closer look. Today is your lucky day because The Verge was able to get their hands on one of the devices along with an interview with Remi El-Ouazzane, CEO of Movidius, which is the company that developed the technology for Tango. Although Google said they have been working on Project Tango for the past year, Movidius has been working on this technology for the past seven years. The Project Tango smartphone features cameras and sensors that are able to map your surroundings in 3D. In fact, El-Ouazzane says that the technology is very similar to NASA’a Exploration Rover when it mapped the surface of Mars. Now they are able to drop the 400 pound vehicle and put it in our hands. There is a 4MP camera along with a lower-resolution image-tracking camera. There is also a special combination RGB and IR sensor onboard. The camera can read the same kind of depth as you and I can and feed it to Movidius’ custom Myriad 1 low-power computer vision sensor. It then crunches the data and feeds it to apps through a set of APIs. Now it’s time for developers to see what kinds of apps they can build that can utilize this data. Google already announced they will be handing out 200 units to developers very soon. There are already some cool examples as The Verge got to see. This included an app that could display the distance heat map on top of what the camera sees, while layering blue colors on objects that were further away, and red colors on closer objects. They also got to see the phone map out an actual 3D model of a scene in real time, drawing it on the display. The potential is amazing. From augmented reality games to helping the visually impaired, Project Tango is likely to be a major player for years to come. Check out the video below and let us know what you think. source: TheVerge Come comment on this article: Here’s a much closer look at Google’s Project Tango Visit TalkAndroid for Android news, Android guides, and much more! News via TalkAndroid
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