For the past year, Google has enlisted universities, labs and hardware partners to build a new kind of phone — really new, not just the next Moto X. The project video shows a phone that rethinks the way mobile devices interact with their environments.
Google’s Project Tango takes advantage of robotic and computer vision advances, the company says. Tango devices are capable of taking more than a quarter of a million measurements a second to track orientation and position in real time. The implications of such technology, according to Google, could impact everything from mapping to mobile games.
The company offered up a list of potential applications for the prototype handset, including finding one’s way inside a building, recording the square footage of your home for interior decorating, locating products on store shelves, playing hide and seek with virtual pals, and helping the visually impaired find their way around.
All of these are just early suggestions, of course, as Project Tango is still in the very early stages. The company has no immediate plans to start mass manufacturing the phone, but it has created 200 prototypes of the device that it will begin handing out to developers with good app ideas, starting in March.
The early devices feature a 4 MP camera, a separate motion tracking camera, two computer vision processors and a depth sensor. The 5-inch phone runs Android, naturally.
It comes out of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) hardware division, a group tasked with making cool, future-thinking hardware devices. That division is headed up by Regina Dugan, who joined Google in 2012 after a stint with military technology agency DARPA.
What role, if any, Google’s newly congealed robotics department will play in the project has yet to be seen, though the robotic arm in the above video did give us a bit of hope.
If you think you’ve got what it takes to get your hands on one of the 200 prototypes, Google’s got a form over on the official Project Tango page. All you need is some personal information, a clip reel, and a dialog box full of cool ideas.
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