Google’s Project Tango will go on-sale in a further 10 countries next week, after Google expanded availability of the development kit firstly to Canada and South Korea earlier this month. With the expanded availability, the team has released a slew of Tango applications including games and apps to Google Play showing off the capabilities of the tablet.
Project Tango is Google’s spatial awareness project that has introduced a number of devices including phones and a tablet that have an impressive array of cameras and sensors on board aimed at mapping the physical world around them and mapping that in real time into a virtual setting that developers can manipulate.
Google introduced Project Tango with a phone back in February 2014, but the device ended up in only very limited release. Google expanded the project releasing a tablet soon after and this year both Qualcomm and Intel have announced new developer phones based Project Tango platform will be released this year.
The newly released apps and games are from the Project Tango team themselves, including:
- MeasureIt – ‘a sample application that shows how easy it is to measure general distances’.
- Constructor – a sample 3D content creation tool where you can scan a room and save the scan for further use.
- Tangosaurs – an app that lets you walk around and dig up hidden fossils that unlock a portal into a virtual dinosaur world.
- Tango Blaster – a game that lets you blast swarms of robots in a virtual world, and can even work with the Tango device mounted on a toy gun
Other developers have also gotten a look in, with the Google Tango team pointing to two apps from developer Johnny C Lee, Tango Village and Multiplayer VR both ‘simple apps that demonstrate how Project Tango’s motion tracking enables you to walk around VR worlds without requiring an input device’.
Other apps are also included such as Break A Leg, Castle Defender and VRMT which show off other abilities of the Tango platform.
The team has also updated a number of apps already available on Google Play under the Project Tango developer name – Project Tango Explorer, Project Tango Core, Project Tango Area Manager and Project Tango App Discovery – referencing the ‘Urquhart release’.
The availability of Tango is severely limited for us here in Australia, the current state of the Australian dollar against the US dollar also adds a barrier to entry. If developers are interested there’s certainly ways to get a Tango tablet, but we’d sure like to see Google add the tablet to our own Google store here in Australia to let our developers have a go.
