Google announced Thursday at its annual I/O developers conference that consumers will be able to buy its Project Tango Tablet in 2015.
The tablet, which was discussed at the event by the ATAP team, is designed to be able to see the World in 3D, according to The Verge. The announcement was made after demonstrations were held for the project.
"Imagine if the directions to your destination didn't stop at the front door, but to tell you exactly where to go and what to do," Johnny Lee, program lead, told the audience. "The compute is here. The compute is genuinely here to do amazing things with our devices. What's missing is the hardware and the software."
Project tango uses a camera, motion sensor and depth-sensing capabilities to see empty spaces and structures the same way that a human does every day, Forbes reported. It is able to track the user's path, elevation and what they see when they move through it, and can do so without GPS, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
"You, sitting in your seat, roughly understand the size of this room as well as the position and orientation of the person sitting next to you," Lee explained. "This sense of special perception is remarkable but we take it for granted every day."
In Lee's demo, an intern walked up a staircase and through an office alongside a real-time model of the staircase. Another video showed a similar path in which he walked through his own house.
Tango is able to remember everything about the space a person walks through and turn it into a video game experience. Lee held one game demo in which he threw a block onto a switch, but had to walk several steps forward to get near it in the game. In the second demo, he walked around in a fantasy world that was set into the 3D map of his home and talked with a small wizard, according to Forbes.
The 7-inch tablet is currently a prototype. Its camera uses a fish-eye lens for wide peripheral vision and a focused lens for direct vision.
"This is cool stuff, isn't it?" Lee said. "There's a tremendous amount of work to do when we think about what we can do when our devices have this awareness."
