The company is turning to a more software-driven approach
Google’s Project Tango has always been an ambitious one. The AR platform had a lot of lofty goals when it was first announced, but unfortunately it looks like Google is giving up on Tango’s hardware approach to augmented reality and is shifting to a more practical software solution. Because of that, the search company has announced that they will be pulling support for Tango come March 2018 next year.
Tango was started in 2014 and in 2016 it produced two consumer phones based on its triple camera tech: Lenovo’s Phab 2 Pro and ASUS’ ZenFone AR. Both phones never really took off commercially because of the high cost associated with them and the enthusiast nature of Project Tango, and the hardware requirements made Tango difficult to integrate into more mainstream designs.
That’s what software-based ARcore, the defacto replacement of Tango, aims to do. The best part of ARcore is that it doesn’t require specialized hardware to work like Tango deoes, and it’s already supported in phones like Google Pixel 2 and the Samsung Galaxy S8.
