Google Kills Its Tango AR Platform: Shifting Its Focus To The Less Complicated ARCore

As Google's newer augmented reality (AR) project, ARCore, is out and functioning, the company admits that its older AR project 'Tango' isn't as great as it was first marketed.

Google took the matter to Twitter, saying that: “Thank you to our incredible community of developers who made such progress with Tango over the last three years,” the company said in a tweet. “We look forward to continuing the journey with you on ARCore.”

Tango was Google's first big AR push. Introducing several new things, like position tracking. It was the future. But the thing is that Tango requires a lot of hardware to work.

Tango devices are basically packed with an IR projector, a time-of-flight camera, and a fisheye motion camera and so forth. Those sensors made phones capable in seeing full 3D.

The first Project Tango device, was the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, and it was expensive. Not only that, it was also slow and didn't have that good looks appeal. What's more, it hungers for power, resulting a poor battery life. The second and last Tango device to ever be released, was the Asus ZenFone AR. It was an improved version, and packed better hardware than the Phab 2 Pro. But at that time, the platform seemed to be dead.

Even without considering the amount of hardware it uses, Tango was never that great. For example, Tango devices were known to have tracking errors and constant drifting. These made some apps unreliable and useless. Even for the simplest tasks, like measuring things, Tango seemed to get it wrong.

With frequent tracking errors, Tango devices were never that great in picking up details. Even if things go right, the device will occasionally run out of memory after a few moments scanning things.

When Google struggled, competitors like Apple, have figured out ways to bring AR feature to phones with just the hardware already on board. This was a huge hit for Google.

For over the course of three years, Tango never really took off. This was the time when Google introduced the newer AR system ARCore, in late August 2017.

Not that Tango is a failure, but it shows that Google learned much from it (and from competitors), and improved the bits to develop ARCore. ARCore itself is heavily based on Tango, that the first SDK was still called "Tango".

The difference between Tango and ARCore is that ARCore can't see in 3D. This is because ARCore has less hardware.

However, it accomplishes many similar things, even without all the additional hardware. The platform simplifies things a bit, focusing on plane detection rather than building a 3D mesh of the space. This allows ARCore to run on popular phones like the Google's Pixel phones and Samsung's Galaxy S8 which both don't have multi-camera IR setups on them.

With LG, Huawei, ASUS, and others also on board the project, Google said that ARCore is soon to have more than 100 million users when version 1.0 is launched.

While Google shuts down Tango, the SDK mostly lives on ARCore. The hardware-heavy version lives in "WorldSense," a tracking technology Google is building for standalone VR headsets.

Published: 
16/12/2017