Google Tango
Google announces its augmented reality project, Tango, going to shutdown on March 1, 2018. Tango is the Google’s first big AR push. The tech giant launches tango in 2014. It solves the issue of position tracking with lots of extra hardware. The devices in Tango come with the aggregate of an Xbox Kinect into the back of a smartphone.
The additional sensors allowed the phone to see in full 3D, which mostly used to bring consumers a small handful of AR games.
While, Lenovo Phab 2 Pro is the first tango device, is an expensive, slow, massive device with rotten looks and poor battery life. The second Tango phone, the Asus ZenFone AR, improves a bit of hardware.
The constant flowing and other tracking errors made some of the coolest apps, like a measuring tape, inaccurate for even small measurements.
Matterport Scenes, an app turned the phone into a handheld 3D scanner, but the tracking errors meant your scans were never great at picking up detail.
The app also crushed the Tango hardware, after a few minutes of scanning things, would close with an out-of-memory error.
AR Core
Google says it looks forward to “continuing the journey with you on ARCore,” which is Google’s revamped take on augmented reality. ARCore can’t see in 3D, but it manages much of the same positional tracking as Tango without all the extra hardware.
The framework only works on Google’s Pixel phones and the Galaxy S8. Google says ARCore will access 100 million users when the launch of its first version, and the 2018 Android phones will work with the service too.
Recently Google seemed committed to Tango. The company was still showing off the technology in this spring. Google representatives said, Google’s vision is to see Tango in every smartphone and BMW announced a partnership with Google Tango at the beginning of the year.
ARCore’s SDK is very similar to Tango’s, although it will live on its predecessor, even though in a more versatile way.
