Google's new Project Tango is an experimental phone that will handed out to 200 developers next month. It will have a Kinect-like vision and a chipset that enables the phones to see the world in a whole different way.

Project Tango comes out of the Advanced Technology and Projects Group and is headed by Johnny Lee, a former Microsoft researcher who was one of the brains behind Kinect.



So imagine a five inch phone that's sort of like a handheld 3D scanner. What's unique is its visual processing chipset. Develoepd by startup Movidius, the Myriad 1 is made from a silicon layout and is capable of more complex processing than any ordinary smartphone chip. CEO Remi El-Ouazzane says the goal is to "extract intelligence out of a scene".

The goal of the project is to create a processor that sees depth and space and objects and context.



Google is interested in leveraging the chipset to create sophisticated mapping applications, and the project itself is a "Mobile device that understands space and motion using custom hardware and software".

The device's sensors will be able to capture and process position, orientation and depth data in real time into a single 3D model, which will then be available via an API. The on-board sensors capture over a quarter of a million 3D measurements every second.



[Project Tango]