Sunday 17 December 2017

Google Tango

Google kills Project Tango AR platform, as focus shifts to ARCore

Google has announced that its augmented reality platform Project Tango will be discontinued next year, on March 1st
Google will stop supporting Project Tango, as the company shifts focus to the ARCore development platform.


As Google’s shifts its focus to the ARCore platform, the company has finally admitted that its ‘Project Tango’ never took off. The company announced that its augmented reality platform Project Tango will be discontinued next year, on March 1. The software giant took to Twitter to announce the news.

“Thank you to our incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years,” the company said in a tweet. “We look forward to continuing the journey with you on ARCore”.

The move makes a lot of sense.  Although Tango has been in existence since 2014, it never managed to get the mass adoption support because it required a dedicated hardware to work in the first place. A Project Tango-enabled smartphone required a depth-sensing camera, IR projector, and a special motion tracking camera. Additionally, it also required the regular camera setup.

Google only managed to get only two smartphone companies on board – Lenovo and Asus – to support its Project Tango platform. The first commercially available Tango device was the Lenovo Phab2Pro, which had a 6.4-inch display and mid-end specifications. The second and the last Tango device was, the Asus ZenFone AR which came to the market earlier this year.  However, both smartphones were expensive, and Tango failed to attract a huge number of developer support.

Now that Tango is dead, Google will be banking on the success of ARCore, a tool that will allow developers to write augmented reality apps for millions of Androiddevice. Not only is ARCore similar to Tango in terms of functionality, it doesn’t require a dedicated hardware like Tango does.  Announced back in August, the platform  is similar to Apple’s ARKit. Google promises ARCore will work with 100 million existing and upcoming devices from 

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