Tango (named Project Tango while in testing) was an

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR), also known as mixed reality (MR), is a technology that overlays real-time 3D computer graphics, 3D-rendered computer graphics onto a portion of the real world through a display, such as a handheld device or head-mounted ...

computing platform A computing platform, digital platform, or software platform is the infrastructure on which software is executed. While the individual components of a computing platform may be obfuscated under layers of abstraction, the ''summation of the requi ...

, developed and authored by the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP), a

skunkworks Skunkworks or Skunk works may refer to: * Skunk Works, an official trademark for the Lockheed Martin Advanced Development Programs (formerly Lockheed Advanced Development Projects). * Skunkworks project, a project typically developed by a small ...

division of

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

. It used

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

to enable

mobile device A mobile device or handheld device is a computer small enough to hold and operate in hand. Mobile devices are typically battery-powered and possess a flat-panel display and one or more built-in input devices, such as a touchscreen or keypad. ...

s, such as

smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

s and tablets, to detect their

position Position often refers to: * Position (geometry), the spatial location (rather than orientation) of an entity * Position, a job or occupation Position may also refer to: Games and recreation * Position (poker), location relative to the dealer * ...

relative to the world around them without using

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite-based hyperbolic navigation system owned by the United States Space Force and operated by Mission Delta 31. It is one of the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that provide geol ...

or other external signals. This allowed application developers to create user experiences that include indoor navigation, 3D mapping, physical space measurement, environmental recognition,

, and windows into a

virtual world A virtual world (also called a virtual space or spaces) is a Computer simulation, computer-simulated environment which may be populated by many simultaneous users who can create a personal Avatar (computing), avatar and independently explore th ...

. The first product to emerge from ATAP, Tango was developed by a team led by computer scientist Johnny Lee, a core contributor to

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Kinect Kinect is a discontinued line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB color model, RGB cameras, and Thermographic camera, infrared projectors and detectors that map dep ...

. 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." Google produced two devices to demonstrate the Tango technology: the Peanut phone and the Yellowstone 7-inch tablet. More than 3,000 of these devices had been sold as of June 2015, chiefly to researchers and software developers interested in building applications for the platform. In the summer of 2015,

Qualcomm Qualcomm Incorporated () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software and services related to wireless techn ...

and

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

both announced that they were developing Tango reference devices as models for device manufacturers who use their mobile chipsets. At CES, in January 2016, Google announced a partnership with

Lenovo Lenovo Group Limited, trading as Lenovo ( , zh, c=联想, p=Liánxiǎng), is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, servers, conv ...

to release a consumer smartphone during the summer of 2016 to feature Tango technology marketed at consumers, noting a less than $500 price-point and a small form factor below 6.5 inches. At the same time, both companies also announced an application incubator to get applications developed to be on the device on launch. On 15 December 2017, Google announced that they would be ending support for Tango on March 1, 2018, in favor of

ARCore ARCore, also known as Google Play Services for AR, is a software development kit developed by Google that allows for augmented reality (AR) applications to be built. ARCore has been integrated into a multitude of devices. Key technologies ARC ...

Overview

Tango was different from other contemporary 3D-sensing computer vision products, in that it was designed to run on a standalone mobile phone or tablet and was chiefly concerned with determining the device's position and orientation within the environment. The software worked by integrating three types of functionality: * Motion-tracking: using visual features of the environment, in combination with

accelerometer An accelerometer is a device that measures the proper acceleration of an object. Proper acceleration is the acceleration (the rate of change (mathematics), rate of change of velocity) of the object relative to an observer who is in free fall (tha ...

and

gyroscope A gyroscope (from Ancient Greek γῦρος ''gŷros'', "round" and σκοπέω ''skopéō'', "to look") is a device used for measuring or maintaining Orientation (geometry), orientation and angular velocity. It is a spinning wheel or disc in ...

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 Tango devices, and enhanced with metadata such as notes, instructions, or points of interest *

Depth perception Depth perception is the ability to perceive distance to objects in the world using the visual system and visual perception. It is a major factor in perceiving the world in three dimensions. Depth sensation is the corresponding term for non-hum ...

: detecting distances, sizes, and surfaces in the environment Together, these generate data about the device in "

six degrees of freedom Six degrees of freedom (6DOF), or sometimes six degrees of movement, refers to the six mechanical degrees of freedom of movement of a rigid body in three-dimensional space. Specifically, the body is free to change position as forward/backw ...

" (3

axes Axes, plural of ''axe'' and of ''axis'', may refer to * ''Axes'' (album), a 2005 rock album by the British band Electrelane * a possibly still empty plot (graphics) See also * Axis (disambiguation) An axis (: axes) may refer to: Mathematics ...

orientation Orientation may refer to: Positioning in physical space * Map orientation, the relationship between directions on a map and compass directions * Orientation (housing), the position of a building with respect to the sun, a concept in building des ...

plus 3 axes of position) and detailed three-dimensional information about the environment. Project Tango was also the first project to graduate from Google X in 2012

Applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

on mobile devices use Tango's C and

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

APIs to access this data in real time. In addition, an API was also provided for integrating Tango with the Unity

game engine A game engine is a software framework primarily designed for the development of video games which generally includes relevant libraries and support programs such as a level editor. The "engine" terminology is akin to the term " software engine" u ...

; this enabled the conversion or creation of games that allow the user to interact and navigate in the game space by moving and rotating a Tango device in real space. These APIs were documented on the Google developer website.

Applications

Tango enabled apps to track a device's position and orientation within a detailed 3D environment, and to recognize known environments. This allowed the creations of 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 Nerf is a toy brand formed by Parker Brothers and currently owned by Hasbro. Most of the toys are a variety of Foam weapon, foam-based weaponry, with other Nerf products including balls for sports such as American football, basketball, an ...

gun with mounted Tango screen for dodging and shooting AR monsters superimposed on reality, and a

multiplayer A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system (couch co-op), on different computing systems via a local area network, or ...

VR app that lets multiple players converse in a virtual space where their

avatar Avatar (, ; ) is a concept within Hinduism that in Sanskrit literally means . It signifies the material appearance or incarnation of a powerful deity, or spirit on Earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearance" is sometimes u ...

movements match their real-life movements. Tango apps are distributed through

Play Play most commonly refers to: * Play (activity), an activity done for enjoyment * Play (theatre), a work of drama Play may refer also to: Computers and technology * Google Play, a digital content service * Play Framework, a Java framework * P ...

. Google has encouraged the development of more apps with

hackathon A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of '' hacking'' and ''marathon'') is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 h ...

s, an app contest, and promotional discounts on the development tablet.

Devices

As a platform for software developers and a model for device manufacturers, Google created two Tango devices.

The Peanut phone

"Peanut" was the first production Tango device, released in the first quarter of 2014. It was a small Android phone with a Qualcomm MSM8974 quad-core processor and additional special hardware including a fisheye motion camera, "RGB-IR" camera for

color image A digital image is an image composed of picture elements, also known as pixels, each with '' finite'', '' discrete quantities'' of numeric representation for its intensity or gray level that is an output from its two-dimensional functions fe ...

and

infrared Infrared (IR; sometimes called infrared light) is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than that of visible light but shorter than microwaves. The infrared spectral band begins with the waves that are just longer than those ...

depth detection, and Movidius

Vision processing unit A vision processing unit (VPU) is (as of 2023) an emerging class of microprocessor; it is a specific type of AI accelerator, designed to accelerate machine vision tasks. Overview Vision processing units are distinct from graphics processing un ...

s. A high-performance accelerometer and gyroscope were added after testing several competing models in the MARS lab at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota Twin Cities (historically known as University of Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint ...

. Several hundred Peanut devices were distributed to early-access partners including university researchers in

and

robotics Robotics is the interdisciplinary study and practice of the design, construction, operation, and use of robots. Within mechanical engineering, robotics is the design and construction of the physical structures of robots, while in computer s ...

, as well as application developers and technology startups. Google stopped supporting the Peanut device in September 2015, as by then the Tango software stack had evolved beyond the versions of Android that run on the device.

The Yellowstone tablet

"Yellowstone" was a 7-inch tablet with full Tango functionality, released in June 2014, and sold as the Project Tango Tablet Development Kit. It featured a 2.3 GHz quad-core Nvidia Tegra K1 processor, 128GB flash memory, 1920x1200-pixel touchscreen, 4MP color camera, fisheye-lens (motion-tracking) camera, an IR projector with RGB-IR camera for integrated depth sensing, and

4G LTE In telecommunications, long-term evolution (LTE) is a standard for wireless broadband communication for cellular mobile devices and data terminals. It is considered to be a "transitional" 4G technology, and is therefore also referred to as 3 ...

connectivity. As of May 27, 2017, the Tango tablet is considered officially unsupported by Google.

Testing by NASA

In May 2014, two Peanut phones were delivered to the

International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station that was Assembly of the International Space Station, assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA (United ...

to be part of a

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the federal government of the United States, US federal government responsible for the United States ...

project to develop autonomous robots that navigate in a variety of environments, including outer space. The soccer-ball-sized, 18-sided polyhedral

SPHERES The Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellite (SPHERES) are a series of miniaturized satellites developed by MIT's Space Systems Laboratory for NASA and US Military, to be used as a low-risk, extensible test bed for t ...

robots" \n\n\n\n\n\n\nrobots.txt is the filename used for implementing the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit.\n\nThe sta ...

were developed at the NASA

Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...

, adjacent to the Google campus in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Mountain V ...

. Andres Martinez, SPHERES manager at NASA, said "We are researching how effective ango'svision-based navigation abilities are for performing localization and navigation of a mobile free flyer on ISS.

Intel RealSense smartphone

Announced at Intel's Developer Forum in August 2015, and offered to public through a Developer Kit since January 2016. It incorporated a RealSense ZR300 camera which had optical features required for Tango, such as the fisheye camera.

Lenovo Phab 2 Pro

Lenovo Phab 2 Pro was the first commercial smartphone with the Tango Technology, the device was announced at the beginning of 2016, launched in August, and available for purchase in the US in November. The Phab 2 Pro had a 6.4 inch screen, a Snapdragon 652 processor, and 64 GB of internal storage, with a rear facing 16 Megapixels camera and 8 MP front camera.

Asus Zenfone AR

Asus Zenfone AR, announced at CES 2017,ASUS announcement at CES 2017
-YouTube was the second commercial smartphone with the Tango Technology. It ran Tango AR & Daydream VR on

Snapdragon 821 The Qualcomm Snapdragon suite of systems on chips (SoCs) are designed for use in smartphones, tablets, laptops, 2-in-1 PCs, smartwatches, and smartbooks devices. Before Snapdragon SoC made by Qualcomm before it was renamed to Snapdragon. ...

, with 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 128 or 256GB of internal memory depending on the configuration.

References

External links

*
Project Tango developer site (API and documentation)

Project Tango developer community

Project Tango Smartphone Development Platform page at Qualcomm

"Intel Expands Developer Opportunities As Computing Expands Across All Areas of Peoples' Lives"
Intel Developer Forum. 20 August 2015.
"Google and Intel bring RealSense to phones with Project Tango dev kit"
Engadget. 18 August 2015.
"Google I/O 2015 - Project Tango - Mobile 3D tracking and perception"
Johnny Lee, Google I/O 2015. YouTube. 29 May 2015.
"Project Tango Concepts"
Johnny Lee, YouTube. 21 April 2015.
"Project Tango Tablet Teardown"
iFixit. 15 August 2014. {{Authority control Computer vision 3D imaging Augmented reality Navigation Mobile technology Google hardware Products and services discontinued in 2018