Google today has announced that it is shutting down the support for project Tango officially on March 1st, 2018. Project Tango was Google’s first ever attempt on augmented reality and it required special hardware in the form of cameras and sensors to accurately map 3D areas which in turn made the phones expensive.
Google’s first Tango device was ‘Peanut’ phone which was available to partners in 2014 later came the Lenovo Phab Pro and Asus Zenfone AR. This move of Google is, however, not very surprising considering the company is now actively working on software-based ARCore. The ARCore is very similar to project tango, and it doesn’t require any special hardware.
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Apart from announcing the shutdown of Project Tango, Google has announced ARCore developers preview, two days after launching the ARCore apps for pixel devices. Today’s update brings several technical improvements to the SDK,
New features in the ARCore developers preview 2 include
- A new C API for use with the Android NDK that complements our existing Java, Unity, and Unreal SDKs;
- Functionality that lets AR apps pause and resume AR sessions, for example to let a user return to an AR app after taking a phone call;
- Improved accuracy and runtime efficiency across our anchor, plane finding, and point cloud APIs.
Google also said that it will soon launch ARCore v1.0, with support for over 100 million devices and many ARCore related apps and experiences will be available through the Play Store.