Two years of relentless tinkering, upgrading, polishing, and here we are — Google’s much rumoured Tango smartphone system is finally, officially out today. Tango has been launched as an Augmented Reality smartphone system, which will be seen first on Lenovo’s PhabPro 2.
The PhabPro2 costs $499 and is available in the US starting today.
To give you a bit of an education on what Tango is, it is an AR platform that uses computer vision to give devices the ability to understand their position relative to the world around them. In even simpler words, consider it simpler to how you use your eyes to detect objects around you, find your way or locate yourselves on a certain location. That’s pretty much Tango.
Google’s Tango is currently targeting three core technology areas — Motion tracking, Area Learning and Depth Perception. Motion tracking allows a device to understand position and orientation using Tango’s custom sensors. For area learning, Tango system devices can perceive objects around them to help recognize the world around them. And the depth sensors integrated into the system, let you know the shape of the world around you.
Tango is debuting with 35 applications so far, with a mix of both gaming and non-gaming apps. Since AR has been primarily been deployed in gaming so far, a lot of this 3 Tango applications are focused towards that genre. Having said that, there are a bunch of really cool, advanced non-gaming app, with their developers trying their best too utilise all of Tango’s sensing abilities.
For example, Matterport’s Scenes app lets you capture real-life scenes in digital 3D. You can use your Tango-enabled smartphone to view, measure and share, scan small spaces or objects and take the 3D models with you everywhere. You can access all the measurements you need, while you go. In fact, the app lets you measure any point-to-point dimension precisely or even use 3D trim to crop objects of interest.
There are a bunch of other cool apps as well, which you can try once you get your hands on a Tango-enabled device. The launch this time is highly limited, but you can expect the Tango system to land on multiple Android devices soon.
