Meet Google's Project Tango, a phone equipped with Kinect-like sensors

Imagine using your phone to create a 3D map of the world around you, one you could use to figure out how furniture will fit in a room or maneuver through an unfamiliar building or find an item on some lone supermarket shelf.

Thanks to a new Google endeavor, you may one day be able to do all these things and more.

Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group has announced Project Tango, a 5-inch Android phone prototype packing customized hardware and software to track its entire 3D motion, combining gathered data into a 3D map of the environment. It has definite Kinect undertones, and for good reason.

ATAP lead Johnny Lee used to work for Microsoft's Kinect crew. Of this Project Tango, Lee said its goal is "to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion."

The phone's sensors can snag over a quarter million 3D measurements a second, and as it updates its position and orientation in real-time, it coalesces the information into a single 3D model.

It houses development APIs that send position, orientation and depth data to standard Android apps.
Though the days are still early, Google envisions Project Tango having applications in gaming, helping the visually-impaired, maps and navigation and other everyday scenarios.

Not for you. Yet

As if you couldn't tell, Project Tango is firmly planted in the "early stages" sands. For now, Google is focusing on "exploration of what might be possible in a mobile platform."

That said, Project Tango does have a few known specs, including a 4MP camera, 2X computer vision processors, integrated depth sensing and a motion tracking camera.

Only 200 prototype dev kits exist, and Google hopes to get them out the door by March 14. The company is searching for professional developers to take a crack at "creating more than a touchscreen app."

Some of the dev sets have been set aside for indoor navigation/mapping, single and multiplayer games that use physical space and new algorithms for processing sensor data. There are also a number set aside for "we haven't thought of yet" purposes.

Check out ATAP's video explaining Project Tango and exploring its possibilities below. Looks pretty nifty, if you ask us.