Google has announced a new phone called Project Tango. With its highly customized hardware and software design, it allows the phone to track its motion in full 3D real-time when held.
The phone uses a 4-megapixel camera, two “Computer Vision Processors,” integrated depth sensing, and a motion tracking camera. The phone’s sensor makes a “quarter million 3D measurements every second,” updating its position and rotation, which is then used to create a 3D model of the environment it’s in.
Project Lead at Google’s Advance Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, Johnny Chung Lee, said he’s been working on Project Tango with universities, research labs and industrial partners to harvest 10 years of research in robotics and computer vision in order to create the unique phone.
“Our goal is to give mobile devices a human scale understanding of space and motion. Imagine that you can scan a small section of your living room and then are able to generate a little game world in it. I don’t know of any other controller or gaming device that can do that.”
Google ATAP said, “Imagine playing hide-and-seek in your house with your favorite game character. Imagine playing against a friend for control over physical space with your own miniature army.”
Lee said that Google will distribute development kits to software developers in the coming months.
Imagine the gaming possibilities with this…
