Google Is Shutting Down Project Tango On March 1st

In February 2014, Google launched Project Tango, which is an Augmented Reality system that was made for mobile use. With ARCore made its first big consumer debut with AR Stickers on the Pixel and Pixel 2 this week. Google announced today that its original augmented reality project Project Tango is shutting down. Tango will no longer be supported next year and given the advantages of ARCore, this moving is not all too surprising.





Today, the Tango Twitter account announced the decision this morning as Google unveiled the second developer preview of ARCore. Begining March 1st of 2018, Tango will no longer be supported, with the company pointing developers to embrace its latest AR initiative instead.

The company finally realized that you do not require special hardware sensors and additional cameras for AR, this move is not all too surprising. Only a handful of consumer Tango devices were ever released and by all indications there was little consumer demand.

Tango peaked in June 2016 when the Lenovo Phab2 Pro was unveiled as the first Project Tango phone. With a huge 6.4-inch screen, the handset came with three cameras on back. The trio included a 16MP RGB camera, a snapper for depth perception, and a motion tracking camera. The result was a phone that offered AR features and ran AR flavored apps. When Lenovo showed off the phone, it demonstrated an app that could allow users to take an image of a piece of furniture from an ad, and show how it would look in any room, from all angles. 

Earlier this year, the Asus ZenFone AR launched with support for Tango and Google's VR platform Daydream. Powered by the Snapdragon 821 SoC, the phone, now discontinued by Verizon, was equipped with a 23MP camera with Sony IMX 318 sensors and OIS. Motion tracking and depth sensing cameras were also placed om back. The phone featured a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display with a 1440 x 2560 QHD display.

Now, as Google shifts its focus to ARCore, software becomes the big driver of AR, which means that you can expect to see Augmented Reality show up as a feature on a large number of Android handsets.


Source : Twitter