California tech giant Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group has announced its ambitious ‘Project Tango’ designed with the objective of giving ‘mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion’. The project will bring 3D technology to smartphones and Google is currently in the phase of providing prototypes of its new 3D vision smartphone to ‘other’ developers to facilitate the writing of new applications.
Project Tango incorporates robotics and vision-processing technology. Its essentially a 12.7-cm (5-inch) Android-based phone and developer kit with advanced 3D sensors which make over 1.4 million measurements per second, updating the positon and rotation of the phone. “What if you could capture the dimensions of your home simply by walking around with your phone before you went furniture shopping? What if directions to a new location didn’t stop at the street address? What if you never again found yourself lost in a new building? What if the visually impaired could navigate unassisted in unfamiliar indoor places? What if you could search for a product and see where the exact shelf is located in a super-store?” states the Google’s official Project Tango web page.
Google is using California-based Movidius’ Myriad 1 vision processor platform for Project Tango. “Google has paved the future direction for smart mobile vision systems and we’re excited to be working with a company that shares our vision to usher in the next wave of applications that fundamentally alter how a mobile device is used to experience the world around us,” Remi El-Ouazzane, chief executive of Movidius was quoted as saying. Other partners include University of Minnesota, George Washington University, German tech firm Bosch and the Open Source Robotics Foundation.
Source: EFY Times
