Inside The Revolutionary 3D Vision Chip At The Heart Of Google's Project Tango Phone
At the core of Google's freshly announced experimental Project Tango smartphone platform is a vision processor called the Myriad 1, manufactured by chip startup Movidius and its CEO Remi El-Ouazzane.
Context & Ripple Effects
The launch of Project Tango earlier the same day put Google's experimental Android phone — built around depth sensors and computer vision rather than a new screen or camera spec — in front of a mainstream audience. This piece zooms into the component that makes it work: the Myriad 1 vision processor from Irish-French chip startup Movidius, run by CEO Remi El-Ouazzane, doing on-device perception instead of shipping sensor data to the cloud.
The pickup list is unusual breadth for a developer prototype: Washington Post, Guardian, Telegraph, MacRumors and The Next Web all carried the story alongside TechCrunch and Movidius's own announcement, signaling that the interesting question for readers was less the phone than whether a dedicated mobile vision chip marks a new hardware category.
First-order effects
- Movidius gets its first flagship design win: a small chip startup's Myriad 1 now sits at the center of one of Google's most-watched experiments, with El-Ouazzane's company suddenly validated by association with Android's owner.
- Google gains a reference architecture — sensors plus a dedicated vision processor — that developers building indoor mapping and 3D-scanning apps can target without needing server-side compute.
Second-order effects
- Mobile silicon vendors now have a proof point that a dedicated vision coprocessor can anchor a phone platform, pressuring Qualcomm and other application-processor makers to treat computer vision as a first-class workload rather than a software afterthought.
- If Tango-style sensing spreads beyond prototypes, handset OEMs face a sourcing decision between integrating third-party vision chips like Movidius's and pushing such features into their existing SoC suppliers' roadmaps.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward smartphones carrying specialized perception silicon alongside CPU and GPU — a structural split in which machine-vision workloads get their own compute, and chip startups can win sockets by owning a single workload deeply.
- On-device 3D perception also raises the stakes for whoever controls the resulting spatial data, foreshadowing the map-and-context layer becoming a competitive battleground between platform owners like Google and the chipmakers enabling capture.
The trend: Mobile computing is splitting into heterogeneous architectures where dedicated perception chips, not general processors, carry machine vision — with Google's Tango experiment and Movidius's Myriad 1 as an early template.