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Draft update to existing Project Tango article[edit]

Project Tango
Services	Computer vision
Website	Project Tango

Project Tango is a technology platform based on computer vision that enables mobile devices to detect their position relative to the world around them, without using GPS or other external signals. This allows application developers to create user experiences for smartphones and tablets that include indoor navigation, 3D mapping, measurement of physical spaces, recognition of known environments, augmented reality, and windows into virtual 3D worlds.

The first product to emerge from Google's ATAP skunkworks group^[1], Project Tango was developed by a team led by computer scientist Johnny Lee, a core contributor to Microsoft's Kinect. In an interview in June 2015, Lee said, "We're developing the hardware and software technologies to help everything and everyone understand precisely where they are, anywhere."^[2]

Google has produced two devices to demonstrate the Project Tango technology: the Peanut phone (no longer available) and the Yellowstone 7-inch tablet. More than 3,000 of these devices had been sold as of June 2015^[3], chiefly to researchers and software developers interested in building applications for the platform. In the summer of 2015, Qualcomm^[4] and Intel^[5] both announced that they are developing Project Tango reference devices as models for device manufacturers who use their mobile chipsets.

Project Tango is different from other emerging 3D-sensing computer vision products, such as Microsoft Hololens, in that it's designed to run on a standalone mobile device and chiefly concerned with determining the device's position and orientation within the environment.

The software works by integrating three types of functionality:

Motion-tracking: using visual features of the environment, in combination with accelerometer and gyroscope data, to closely track the device's movements in space
Area learning: storing environment data in a map that can be re-used later, shared with other Project Tango devices, and enhanced with metadata such as notes, instructions, or points of interest
Depth perception: detecting distances, sizes, and surfaces in the environment

Together, these generate data about the device in "six degrees of freedom" (3 axes of orientation plus 3 axes of motion) and detailed three-dimensional information about the environment.

Applications on mobile devices use Project Tango's C and Java APIs to access this data in real time. In addition, an API is also provided for integrating Project Tango with the Unity game engine; this enables the rapid conversion or creation of games that allow the user to interact and navigate in the game space by moving and rotating a Project Tango device in real space. These APIs are documented on the Google developer website.

Applications[edit]

Project Tango enables apps to track a device's position and orientation within a detailed 3D environment, and to recognize known environments. This makes possible applications such as in-store navigation, visual measurement and mapping utilities, presentation and design tools, and a variety of immersive games. At Augmented World Expo 2015, Johnny Lee demonstrated a construction game that builds a virtual structure in real space, an AR showroom app that allows users to view a full-size virtual automobile and customize its features, a hybrid Nerf gun with mounted Project Tango screen for dodging and shooting AR monsters superimposed on reality, and a multiplayer VR app that lets multiple players converse in a virtual space where their avatar movements match their real-life movements.^[6]

Project Tango apps are distributed through the Google Play Store. Google has encouraged the development of more apps with hackathons, an app contest, and promotional discounts on the development tablet.^[7]

The Peanut phone[edit]

"Peanut" was the first production Project Tango device, released in the first quarter of 2014. The device was a small Android phone with a Qualcomm MSM8974 quad-core processor and additional special hardware including a fisheye-lens camera, "RGB-IR" camera (for color and infrared depth detection), and Movidius image-processing chips. A high-performance accelerometer and gyroscope were added after testing several competing models in the MARS lab at the University of Minnesota.

The Peanut provided a base device for further research and a platform on which software developers could begin creating applications. Several hundred Peanut devices were distributed to early-access partners including university researchers in computer vision and robotics, as well as application developers and technology startups.

In May 2014, two Peanut phones were delivered to the International Space Station to be part of a NASA project to develop autonomous robots that navigate in a variety of environments, including outer space. The soccer-ball-sized, 18-sided polyhedral SPHERES robots were developed at the NASA Ames Research Center, adjacent to the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Andres Martinez, SPHERES manager at NASA, said "We are researching how effective Project Tango's vision-based navigation abilities are for performing localization and navigation of a mobile free flyer on ISS.^[8]

Google stopped supporting the Peanut device in September 2015, as by then the Project Tango software stack had evolved beyond the versions of Android that run on the device.

The Yellowstone tablet[edit]

"Yellowstone" is a 7-inch tablet with full Project Tango functionality, released in June of 2014, and sold as the Project Tango Tablet Development Kit. ^[9] It features a 2.3GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra K1 processor, 128GB flash memory, 1920x1200-pixel touchscreen, 4MP color camera, motion-tracking camera, integrated depth sensing, and 4G LTE connectivity.^[10]The device is sold through the official Project Tango website and the Google Play Store.