Using an experimental Android prototype, Google wants developers to jot down apps that do something interesting with real-time awareness of users’ surroundings.

Google desires to hear from developers who can create mobile apps that depend on precise awareness of users’ surroundings.

On Thursday, the company’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, to not be confused with its X Lab, invited developers to submit proposals for applications that make the most of Project Tango, an experimental Android-based phone. The telephone is built with custom hardware and software for tracking the device because it moves in real-time and generating a 3D model of the local area.

Project Tango hardware, able to taking 1 / 4 million 3D measurements every second, depends on a software development kit (SDK) with APIs for accessing position, orientation, and depth data through Android apps written in Java or C/C++, or during the Unity Game Engine (which may build for Android devices and other platforms too).

Current smartphones can manage limited tracking of position and orientation, but lack the whole range of sensors and precision to run the categories of applications Google envisions. More significantly, they don’t seem to be designed to position the device within a 3D representation of the local environment.

Project Tango phones include a vision processing system, a depth sensor, and a motion tracking camera, in addition to the gyroscopes and orientation sensors present in other smartphones. They are often regarded as something like a mobile version of Microsoft’s Kinect system.

The gaming applications are obvious, and is the reason why the SDK have been designed to work with Unity, some of the leading professional game development frameworks. Given Project Tango phones, developers could create apps that, as an instance, tracked player movements accurately enough to see whether a virtual laser blast from one player hit another player or a disadvantage.

But the possible applications go far beyond entertainment. Google suggests its devices should be ready to: capture the scale of a person’s home, to assist simplify furniture shopping; enable directions that stretch into buildings instead of stopping at street-level doors; help the visually impaired navigate; and locate products precisely on a shelf in a massive store.

[Who will own the information? Read Google’s Android Contract: Not Very Open.]

What’s more, the facility to simply integrate depth information into images has the prospective to simplify image editing. A camera app with access to image depth data have to be ready to identify objects in photos and separate them for manipulation rather more easily than if it needed to depend upon edge detection and color data algorithms. Such an app, in theory, could support one-touch removal of objects from a picture, instead of requiring the manual tracing of object outlines for excision.

Given Google’s longstanding interest in indoor mapping and its recently published patent application for crowdsourcing indoor locations, Project Tango suggests Google aims to take Street View, or something prefer it, beyond the road and into businesses and houses. Indoor mapping data, incidentally, should prove particularly useful for Google’s nascent robot business — reliable navigation in confined spaces, with obstacles which will move, remains a challenge for robots.

It continues to be seen how Google, let alone legal authorities, will extend privacy protections to each of the indoor data that gets generated and squirreled away on Google servers.

Google says it intends to distribute 200 Project Tango devices by March 14.

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Thomas Claburn have been writing about business and technology since 1996, for publications equivalent to New Architect, PC Computing, InformationWeek, Salon, Wired, and Ziff Davis Smart Business. Before that, he worked in film and tv, having earned a not particularly useful … View Full Bio

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