Google’s Project Tango Tablet will be ready for consumers next year

Google’s I/O conference offered a great preview of what the future holds in terms of gadgets and daily interactions with our cars and homes. On the second day of the event, Regina Dugan and the ATAP team took the stage to present some even ambitious projects. One of these is Project Tango, which aims to equip tablets and smartphones with special cameras to allow them see the world in 3D. We’ve seen the project presented before in prototype form in the past, and even back then it looked promising. It seems that the project is still in its early stages, but the team announced on Thursday that they plan partnering up with LG to build consumer tablets that it will go on sale next year. Team ATAP’s announcement came after a great demo that showed off the clear potential that Project Tango holds.

“Imagine if the directions to your destination didn’t stop at the front door, but to tell you exactly where to go and what to do,” program lead Johnny Lee told the audience. “The compute is here. The compute is genuinely here to do amazing things with our devices. What’s missing is the hardware and the software.” The program lead also showed some demos of mapping his house and even presented a virtual-reality game. The goal of Project Tango is to present the benefits and potential uses of a fully mapped world or environment in real time. One potential use of a device using Project Tango’s mapping capabilities is at catastrophes, where the environment is drastically changed and a real time mapping of the scene might prove crucial for rescue operations.

For now, Project Tango is still a prototype and we have no price, specs or release date information on the upcoming LG Tango tablet. Considering how the ATAP team is evolving we might not have to wait for long until some new information shows up on the project. What do you think about Project Tango? Tell us in the comment section bellow.