Augmented reality has literally changed the way we use our smartphones, it’s now a lot more fun to play around with AR and experience the stuff we get to watch. Google, the search giant introduced its first ever augmented reality platform, Tango, back in 2014 and since it has sailed itself to the top. Tango ran on advanced camera hardware in order to build the 3D objects of spaces which was similar to the ones seen on HoloLens from Microsoft.
On 16th December, 2017, Google announced that it’s shutting down Tango in order to focus more on ARCore products. ARCore was announced back in August which was the moment when almost everyone got a clue that its gonna be the end of Tango. Google made the news about the end of Project Tango official via a tweet.
We’re turning down support for Tango on March 1, 2018. Thank you to our incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years. We look forward to continuing the journey with you on ARCore. https://t.co/aYiSUkgyie
— Tango (@projecttango) December 15, 2017
First launched in 2014, Tango was Google’s first ever attempt at AR and it required a lot of special hardware which basically made the price of the phones go even higher. Peanut was Google’s first ever Tango device which was accessible to the partners. It was very hard for Google to get phone manufacturers to include an expensive function into their products which were actually targeted at budget audiences.
However, they could manage to get the Tango platform up and running on some of the smartphones. The smartphone makers Google managed to partner were Lenovo and Asus, who made Tango-supported devices like Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and Asus ZenFone AR.
Google’s ARCore is now available to the developers for experiments. It’s pretty understandable that the reason Tango was shut down was due to the expensive hardware. ARCore cuts that down as it doesn’t require any additional hardware. The new platform has been already rolled out to Google Pixel devices and Samsung Galaxy S8. Google is already working with tech giants like Samsung, Huawei, Asus, and LG for quality checks.
Google will also launch the ARCore v1.0 that will have support for more than 100 million devices and many apps are to be made available on the Play Store very soon. Google released the ARCore Developers Preview 2 just yesterday that brings a lot of technical improvements that you can read about on the Google blog. Meanwhile, Apple has announced its ARKit which focuses on AR applications which means it’s we can see a lot of developments in this section.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoS7VwKd0Ys
