Google Officially Unveils Project Tango Tablet
We’d only heard rumors before, but now the news is legit: Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Group, or ATAP, has unveiled the Project Tango tablet in a video meant to give developers a glimpse into what’s possible.
Take a look at the video:
While the video itself doesn’t say much about the project and what it expects from developers, it does provide a number of important technical details for what exactly is going on inside the tablet. The main UI itself looks very reminiscent of Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, which is unsurprising considering that tablet’s OS is pure Android. The Project Tango tablet is also 7-inches, a size ATAP decided to go with in order to give developers an easier time to transition from the Nexus to the Tango.
Underneath the hood, however, is a seriously powerful bunch of hardware: an NVIDIA Tegra K1 mobile processor, 4 GB of RAM, and 128 GB of internal storage. The Tegra K1 is armed with 192 GPU cores, and also sports NVIDIA’s 4-Plus-1 quad-core ARM cortex, which can offer speeds of up to 2.3 GHz. That’s desktop-level processing power, and when combined with the high-efficiency Myriad 1 vision processor architecture from Movidius, chances are good that the tablet will be capable of some seriously amazing computer vision feats.
The development kit – which also sports WiFi, Bluetooth, and 4G LTE – goes on sale later this year, and will cost a pricey $1024. That cost, though, is clearly not meant for consumers, but rather for developers who want to be on the cutting edge of vision processing technology.
As it stands now, neither the tablet nor the phone incarnations of Project Tango are slated for any kind of public consumption. But hopefully developers will find interesting ways to harness these devices’ powers and come up with some really revolutionary applications for their 3D-mapping capabilities.
[Project Tango]