It’s an ambitious project, but that should be no surprise given who it’s coming from: Tango comes out of the Advanced Technology and Projects group — one of the few pieces of Motorola that Google has opted to hang on to rather than sell. “The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion,” Johnny Lee, leader of Project Tango, says. Google has 200 devices that it’s preparing to give out to developers who want to build mapping tools, games, and new algorithms that take advantage of the phone’s sensors, and it expects to send them all out by March 14th.
Google stresses that the technology is still in early stages, but it still sees it as on the way to reaching millions of people down the road. And now, the Advanced Technology and Projects group will have plenty of time and resources to make that happen. Alongside the announcement of Tango, Android chief Sundar Pichai extended a welcome to the team, suggesting that they’ve now fully fallen underneath Google. The group is also responsible for Project Ara, which hopes to build modular smartphones.