More Project Tango Specs Revealed, Showing Two Wide-Angle And One Depth-Sensing Camera

Google’s Project Tango smartphone is a 3D environment sensing hardware experiment, which the company is hoping to ship to developers soon (today is the anticipated ship date Google stated, in fact) had some of its specs revealed in a Chrome issue tracker spotted by Myce this morning. The new specs give us a closer look at how exactly Google does its 3D context sensing magic.

The key ingredients appear to be three cameras that capture a 120-degree wide-angle field of view from the front, an even wider 180 degree span from the back, a depth sensing camera that captures images at the relatively modest 320×180 resolution, and a 4MP color camera sensor for snapping regular pics. That’s a lot of photo gear packed into one device, but the 5-inch prototype smartphone handset still retains relatively consumer-friendly dimensions, judging by early video looks.

Tango is the work of Google’s Advanced Technology And Projects (ATAP) division, a group it acquired from Motorola when it bought that company’s mobile devices business, and retained when it sold it again to Lenovo. The special R&D group is staffed by ex-DARPA and other senior technical staff, and has also spearheaded the Project Ara modular smartphone project, as well as done work on tattoo-based authenticators and medication delivery methods.

While in its early stages, Tango also paves the way for a lot more to come on the back of improvements to smartphone-based robotic vision work, which has amazing potential for the future of mobile devices.