Lenovo and Google announce plans for first consumer Project Tango phone by this summer
Project Tango is Google’s vision to bring augmented reality to phones by enabling devices to be able to sense where they are and what is around them. During the announcement, Google’s Johnny Lee demonstrated measuring a room using a prototype Project Tango tablet and then shopping at Lowes for furniture that would fit it.
Lee also showed off a Project Tango app augmented reality virtual cat and dog roaming the room too.
Lenovo was sparse on details but said it would integrate a fisheye, an RGB, and depth sensing camera into the phone to enable the ability for its phone to sense its surroundings. The industrial design of the Lenovo Project Tango-enabled phone hasn’t been set but Lenovo’s Jeff Meredith said it would be no bigger than 6.5-inches. Meredith also said it would be launched worldwide this “summer” and be powered by an Qualcomm Snapdragon processors.
Google’s Lee also announced an app incubator program and invited people to submit ideas. Showing the urgency of Google’s Project Tango though, ideas would only be accepted until Feb. 15, 2016.
That’s likely to insure there’s software to actually make the Lenovo Project Tango phone useful when released just months later.