Google teams up with Lenovo on smartphone with Project Tango's augmented reality
Lenovo and Google announced a partnership today to create a new smartphone that makes use of a 3D augmented reality technology known as Project Tango. — Johnny Lee, a member of the Tango team at Google …
Context & Ripple Effects
By January 2016, Project Tango had already shed its gated-experiment phase: Google had partnered with Qualcomm on a reference phone and dropped the preapproval requirement, opening the hardware to any developer willing to buy in. The missing piece was a name-brand consumer device — and Bloomberg had just reported Google planned a big Tango push around indoor mapping and VR, seeking eventual ubiquity.
First-order effects
- Lenovo gets a rare differentiation lever in commodity Android hardware: a 3D-sensing smartphone no rival OEM can ship, while Google gets its first major-device partner to carry Tango beyond dev kits.
Second-order effects
- Depth cameras and motion sensors become a new bill-of-materials line for smartphone suppliers, and competing Android makers must decide whether to license Tango-class hardware or concede the AR niche to Lenovo's first-mover device.
Third-order effects
- If the $499 consumer price point holds — as it did when Lenovo announced the Phab 2 Pro and began shipping it in November — smartphones double as indoor-mapping capture fleets, putting whoever controls Tango's spatial software layer in position to gatekeep location data the way map providers once did.
The trend: Android is entering its sensor-driven differentiation era, with Google seeding AR hardware standards through partner OEMs rather than building phones itself.