Project Tango: Google’s ‘eyes’

Google has long spoken about how it only cares about Moonshot ideas that could potentially advance the state of the art by an order of magnitude, not ideas that simply improve upon past work or technology, incrementally. 

The past outcomes of the Moonshot philosophy include the Android OS, Google Glass, the Self-Driving Car and Gmail so, we can assume that the approach has served the company quite well. 

The latest purchase Google made was its expensive acquisition and subsequently its substantially cheaper sale of Motorola Mobility, in the process retaining Motorola’s Advanced Technologies and Projects Lab. 

The lab’s latest prototype is called Project Tango, a smartphone that has state-of-the art ‘computer vision’ technology derived from Microsoft’s Kinect platform. The technology will simply allow the phone to well, see and scan a room and simultaneously build a 3D model of the room. 

The phone will then expose this functionality to developers to use as they see fit launching mobile computer vision into the market. It is also expected that computer vision for the Google Glass will follow suite in a few years.

Right now the technology is still in the Beta testing phase, so if any developer has some good ideas for applications they can build with the technology, they drop a message to Google, which will then help develop a software ecosystem for the technology before its public launch.