Google’s Project Tango tablet revealed with Tegra K1 inside
Murmurings of a tablet version of Project Tango have been swirling about for a few weeks now, but those murmurings have just been converted into official word — the Project Tango Tablet has been officially unveiled. If you’re not sure what Project Tango is, it’s a project Google is using to develop compact, portable devices with image sensors that can understand depth and map 3D surroundings like no device in its class has been able to do before.
You can pretty much think of it as the same technology being used in Google’s self-driving vehicles, except in tablet and smartphone form. We’re not sure what their ultimate vision is for these devices just yet, though we imagine Google will want developers to help shape that vision.
The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion
That’s why this device isn’t necessarily meant for consumers. It’s a developers’ kit — one that costs $1,024, funnily enough — and comes packed with a suite of specs that we wish we could have in today’s flagship tablets and / or smartphones.
Here’s what developers will be looking forward to inside the body of this thing:
- NVIDIA Tegra K1 chipset with 192 GPU cores
- 4GB of RAM
- 7-inch display
- 128GB of internal storage
- 4G LTE (availability depends on region and carrier)
- Bluetooth 4.0 LE
- WiFi
- Motion tracking camera
- Integrated depth sensor
- Android 4.4 KitKat
Again, this is for serious developers who want to help Google decide how this technology can fit into modern society and help change the way our devices work for us. You can sign up for a chance to receive a kit at Google’s site right now, though if you’re going to Google I/O later this month we hear these will be up for grabs as part of the annual freebie parade. Let’s hope Google gives us a better sense of how these devices can help us when they take the stage in San Francisco June 25th.