Google ends support for Tango to focus on ARCore

Google's Project Tango is an AR platform build specifically for smartphones. And now with the company's latest augmented reality platform ARCore is out and functional, Google has decided to shut down Tango on March 1, 2018.

Project Tango was first introduced in 2014 and was Google's first ever attempt on augmented reality. The technology enabled the smartphone to provide augmented reality experiences by understanding the world around it through 3D mapping.

However Tango enabled phones required extra expensive hardware like depth sensing camera, motion tracking camera and more to support the technology. The first Tango based device was the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro. One more device was released from Asus called ZenFone AR that utilized the technology and it was the last. Both were expensive and hardly picked up from the shelf. So the termination of the technology does not come as a surprise.

On the other hand Google will now focus on the new ARCore platform that brings AR experiences closer to Android users. It is a new developer toolkit, designed for building augmented reality apps for a broad range of devices, but does not require any specialized hardware. ARCore powers the recently released AR Sticker on the Pixel camera.

Meanwhile Google has released ARCore Developer Preview 2 with several technical improvements that are listed below.

• A new C API for use with the Android NDK that complements our existing Java, Unity, and Unreal SDKs;
• Functionality that lets AR apps pause and resume AR sessions, for example to let a user return to an AR app after taking a phone call;
• Improved accuracy and runtime efficiency across our anchor, plane finding, and point cloud APIs.

Google also said that it will soon launch ARCore v1.0, with support for over 100 million devices. Also many augmented reality experiences will be available in the Play Store soon.

Source

Kaiser Bey

Kaiser is a tech enthusiast who likes to write, read and talk about tech. He dreams of going to Mars and never come back. We hope that you find his posts on AndroGuider helpful and informative