Google and Qualcomm Partner To Make A Project Tango Smartphone
by Brandon Chester on May 30, 2015 1:17 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- Project Tango
Project Tango is the name of Google's initiative to build smartphones and tablets with cameras and sensors that can be used to track its position in 3D space, and to map the environment around it. The initial reference kit was a 7" tablet which uses NVIDIA's Tegra K1 SoC, and was the only Project Tango device available to developers at a steep price. That will be changing soon, with an announcement from Qualcomm and Google that a Project Tango smartphone is current being developed.
While there aren't many details as of yet, an image from Engadget shows that the phone will have the necessary array of cameras for capturing information the information about the phone's environment. Naturally, the phone will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 SoC. According to Qualcomm, this new Project Tango development platform will be available to developers during the third quarter of this year
Source: PR Newswire via Engadget
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dragantoe - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
neat, hopefully no overheating issuesdyc4ha - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
Maybe OEM's can't go with any other SoC... but surely Google can. They do not require nearly as much volume, so why 810? Surely they can get something else without the overheating issues? Intel+Imagination?SunLord - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
If this is anything like qualcomms dev platflorm phone then it likely not built to be super thin so it's probably bot going to have over heating issuestestbug00 - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
Because the 810 is the fastest commercial SoC that is viable in a phone currently?From my understanding. Or, at least, at the time this phone was designed it was.
lilmoe - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
uh huh, okptmmac - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
Is anyone else getting the creepy feeling that Google is going to use this to map the world in 3d so it can monetize the data? Being able to calculate exactly where you are and how you are pointing your phone when you take a picture is weird unless you want more data out of the picture than you currently get? Add this to Google's new photo storage system and you can map the world for the internet of "things".Solandri - Sunday, May 31, 2015 - link
While it could potentially be used that way, the real benefit of something like this is the ability to produce DSLR-like photos using a smartphone camera. The large aperture of DSLR lenses gives you two things - less noise and a narrower focal plane (blurring of the foreground and background). The latter is why portraits taken with a DSLR look so much better - you can blur the background so that it's not distracting to the portrait.If you can snap a photo with a smartphone camera (with everything in focus), and you can also capture depth information, you can recreate a DSLR's blurring with software. Originally I thought light field cameras would get there first and make DSLR lenses obsolete (except for low-light photography). But now I think 3D sensing technology is going to pass up light field cameras.
testbug00 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
doesn't matter if your sensor is way smaller. Physics wins.teng029 - Saturday, May 30, 2015 - link
yet another project that Google will eventually lose interest in..andychow - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
"was the only Project Tango device available to developers at a steep price"? I'm not sure what you define as steep, but it has 128 GB storage, 4 GB ram, 1920*1200 screen, 4G LTE, high-tech sensors, and a price tag of $512. I kind of thought it was pretty cheap. Also came with docking station.